His Obsession

Chapter 9: Coming To Get You

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…#OMAH

Amelia was still sitting on the stairwell step when she heard footsteps…fast, controlled, unmistakably his.

Adrian appeared at the top of the stairs moments later, jacket gone, sleeves rolled, a look on his face she'd never seen from him before. Not the coldness. Not the careful control. Something rawer than that, something that looked almost like panic held together by sheer will.

"You're still here," he said, relief cutting through his voice before he could stop it.

"You told me to stay." Amelia pushed herself up from the step, legs unsteady. "Adrian, what is going on? You said I've been connected to your father's death since I was born. I need you to explain that. Right now."

"Not here." He glanced past her, down the stairwell, like he expected someone to be listening. "My car's downstairs. We're leaving."

"I'm not going anywhere until you tell me something."

"Amelia…"

"No." She planted her feet, arms crossed, even as her heart hammered against her ribs. "I have spent the last week finding out my father ran away from home, your sister is missing, and some stranger keeps texting me secrets in pieces like it's a game. I am done being handled. Tell me what you meant."

Adrian's jaw tightened. For a moment, she thought he'd shut down completely, retreat behind rule ten and walk away like he always did when things got too close.

Instead, he exhaled, long and unsteady, and something in him seemed to give way.

"My father didn't die in an accident," he said quietly. "I've believed that for four years. I just never had proof."

The stairwell went very still.

"What do you mean he didn't…"

"I mean someone ran him off that road on purpose." Adrian's voice was flat now, stripped of all its usual control, like he was reciting something he'd rehearsed a thousand times in his head and never said aloud. "The investigation called it mechanical failure. I never believed that. My father maintained that car obsessively. He wouldn't have died from a brake failure. Someone made it look that way."

"And you think my father was involved."

"I think your father knew something." Adrian met her eyes, and there was no anger in his expression, only a kind of exhausted honesty. "The consulting contract you found…it wasn't standard business. My father hired your father to investigate something. Financial records. Irregularities inside the company that my father didn't trust anyone else to look into."

Amelia's mind raced. "So my dad was helping him. Not hurting him."

"That's what I believed, for years. Until three weeks ago, when I found something in my father's old files that changed everything." Adrian's hands curled into fists at his sides, like he was fighting to stay steady. "A letter. Unfinished. Addressed to your father. My father wrote it two days before he died, and in it, he said he'd discovered something about the investigation that put both of their families in danger. He said he was afraid. He asked your father to protect you…specifically you, Amelia…if anything happened to him."

The world tilted sideways.

"Protect me? Why me? I would have been sixteen."

"I don't know why you, specifically. That's the part I still don't understand." Adrian's voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "But it's why I hired you. Not because of qualifications. Not because of anything you did. I saw your name on an application three weeks ago and I recognized it immediately, because I'd been staring at that letter for years, trying to understand what my father meant. I thought if I brought you close enough, I could figure out what he knew. What you might know, even if you didn't realize it."

Amelia felt something crack open in her chest…betrayal, confusion, something rawer than either. "So this was never really about hiring an assistant. It was an investigation. I was a…what, a lead? A source?"

"At first." Adrian took a step toward her, and there was something desperate in the way he said it, like the distance between them physically pained him. "At first, yes. That's the truth, and I should have told you weeks ago. But Amelia, it stopped being that a long time before tonight. You have to know that."

"How am I supposed to know that? You've been lying to me since day one."

"I know." His voice broke fully this time, all the careful control gone. "I know, and I don't have a way to make that right except to tell you everything now, before it's too late. Victoria is missing because someone knows I've been getting close to the truth. Someone accessed your file tonight because they know you're connected to it too. Your father ran because he's protecting you the only way he knows how…by disappearing so no one can use him against you."

Amelia's breath caught. "You think whoever did this to your father is coming after my family. Because of me."

"I think you're the only person left alive who might know something they can't afford to have found." Adrian closed the last of the distance between them, close enough now that she could see how badly his hands were shaking. "And I think I made a catastrophic mistake by not telling you the truth the moment I understood how much danger that put you in."

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The stairwell felt too small, too quiet, filled only with the sound of their breathing and everything unsaid hanging between them.

"Say something," Adrian said finally, quiet and unguarded in a way she'd never heard from him.

"I don't know what to say." Amelia's voice shook. "You hired me as a…a source. An experiment. Not because you wanted me here."

"That's not true anymore." His eyes held hers, fierce and certain despite everything else falling apart around them. "Maybe it was true three weeks ago. It is not true now. I have spent every day since watching you break every rule I built to protect myself from exactly this…from caring about someone enough that losing them would destroy me…and I let you, Amelia. I let you, because some part of me stopped being able to imagine this office, this company, this life, without you standing in the middle of it."

Amelia's chest ached, too many feelings crowding in at once to sort through any of them.

"That sounds like an obsession," she said quietly. "Not a relationship."

"Maybe it is." Adrian didn't flinch from the word. "I have never been good at wanting things carefully, Amelia. I told you that in my rules, if you'd read between the lines. I don't know how to want someone halfway."

His phone buzzed sharply in his pocket, cutting through the moment like a blade. He glanced down, and whatever softness had been in his face vanished instantly, replaced by cold alarm.

"What is it?" Amelia asked.

Adrian's hand tightened around the phone. "They found Victoria's car. Abandoned. Twenty minutes from here."

"Is she…"

"There's blood on the seat." His voice was flat now, controlled in the way that scared her more than his panic had. "Amelia, we need to go. Now. Both of us. Together, where I can see you."

He grabbed her hand before she could argue…the first time he'd touched her at all since she'd started this job, warm and steady despite everything falling apart around them…and pulled her toward the stairs.

They were three steps down when Amelia's phone buzzed one final time.

She stopped, breath catching, and pulled it free with her free hand.

The unknown number. A single line, sent like a countdown.

‘You should have listened. Now she pays for what your fathers started.’

Amelia's knees nearly buckled beneath her.

Adrian turned, following her gaze to the screen, and whatever color remained in his face drained away completely.

"Who sent that?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper.

"I don't know," Amelia said, hands shaking around the phone. "But Adrian…I think they know exactly where we are right now.”