His Billionaire Heir

Chapter 4 Part 2

Ethan had been itching to vow that he would try. What emerged instead was the question that had been gnawing behind his teeth all night. "May I see him? Even for an hour? Does the law permit a supervised visit before paternity is confirmed?"

"Anything is possible," Patrick said. "If the mother does agree, yes. If not, we can pursue emergency supervised visitation, but that would require a demonstration of immediate harm or neglect. In all honesty, the most straightforward path is cooperation. If she chooses to be reasonable, it's simple and neat. If not, it's dirty."

"Then make the mess manageable." He nodded curtly. "And set DNA collection on an expedited schedule. No errors."

The conference went downhill into a dozen procedural memos and backroom searches. Ethan left the firm with a file full of possibilities and a sense of the bureaucratic grind that was ahead. He knew the unavoidable reality of days to come: leverage would count. So would patience, something he had not yet acquired.

He did not return to the penthouse. He went instead to one location where he had witnessed all three of them: the bakery. He justified it as reconnaissance, a way to know. He justified it as closure. The truth was simpler and more dangerous—he wished to smell the flour and listen to the beat of a child's laughter, to feel the ordinary things that had been stolen by years of absence.

He arrived late that morning, not as an emperor but as a man trying to be subtle. He carried a small wooden train, too large for the boutique toys his son would most likely find at one of the upscale shops Ethan had a tendency to order for charity.

The wooden train was simple, crafted in soft curves and varnished with love. He had selected it because he believed that a child would enjoy something other than about wealth but about being held.

Isabella stood over a steady, her fingers deft as she shaped dough into bread. She was tired in a way that no bright advertisement could fix—lines of wakefulness at the edges of her eyes, the set of her shoulders carrying ever-present weight of provision.

She stood stock still when she saw him, then finished with the customer with the ferocity of a surgeon.

She moved toward him, cautious as a woman who had learned to store treasures in a storm-shelter.

"Noah isn't here," she said hastily, before he could get his word out. Her tone was not accusatory so much as definitive. "He's with Mrs. Henderson until tomorrow. I told you that."

"I know," Ethan said. He set down the wooden train on the counter. "For him. I thought—if you would let me, I would leave it with you. For Noah."

She regarded him for a long time, the sort of regard that measured motive and came to rest somewhere between suspicion and an unhealed hurt. "Why would you give him something you never knew he needed?"

"Because I don't purchase affection, Isabella," Ethan responded softly. "I want to be there. I want to be part of his life."

She laughed for a moment, a dry laugh that didn't reach her eyes. "Part of his life? You disappeared. Vanished. Like smoke. You don't get to become part of it now because it's convenient."

"I'm not looking for a trophy," he said. "I'm asking for a chance."

She grabbed the train as though she might toss it into a garbage can. Then, delicately, she put it into a paper bag, folding the top as if putting away a fragile letter. "I'll give it to him," she stated curtly.

He wanted to ask for more, to bargain, to propose an agreement that would suit all. Rather, he was revealing something he had never even uttered aloud. "I will not hurt him," he said.

"And I will not use my power to ride over you. I want him in my life. The rest—things legal, formalities—I will let the process carry them. But I want to meet him. Without force."

She softened for a moment. He picked up the glint of younger years on her face. She had once trusted him in mad, sweet ways. That memory flared for an instant before she went into armor again.

"You'll get your opportunity," she said finally. "In the courts. If the courts allow it, you might. But not before. Not like this."

He nodded, and in the nod was the weight of a promise. He left the bakery with an emptiness in his chest and the memory of a child's drawing burned behind his eyes. The wooden train lay in a paper bag, a motionless symbol of a man trying to be generous.

Outside, his chauffeur stood. "Where now, sir?"

"Treat if she has made any travel plans," Ethan told her. "Verify to see if there are any visits arranged. And verify Mrs. Henderson's home. Then obtain the hospital birth certificate of Noah."

The black car rumbled into traffic when his phone began to vibrate. A coded message from one of his team members flashed across the screen.

We pulled hospital records. Mother listed: Isabella Marlowe. No father's name listed on record. Birth registered five years ago at Mercy General. No social services indicators. No prior claims.

He breathed slowly. The lack of a father's name placated and infuriated him; placated because the possibility of privacy had been held on to, infuriated because a deliberate exclusion had taken place. He had been effaced on a page where he had previously believed that he ought to be written.

Then another ping. A data packet. An image. He opened it.

The picture was blurry but clear: Isabella on the bakery stoop, a suitcase at her side, Noah peering from the edge of a cardboard box. The timestamp in the corner blinked: that morning. A bus terminal in the background, plates smeared. A name—a pseudonym—next to it, typed. She was leaving. Tonight.

Ethan stared at the photo as if it were a schematic. The edges of his lips set. He had minutes. Not tomorrow. Not after paperwork and lawyers. Minutes.

He looked up, past the glass of his car windshield. For the first time since he had learned what it was to be an heir, Ethan Blackwood felt the rules bend. He had fought for boardrooms and balance sheets, and he would fight for this one with equal fervor.

"This changes everything," he growled into his phone, his voice raspy.

"Got it," came the reply. "Team is coming. Where do you have it to stop?"

He recalled Noah's photograph. The storm-hued eyes that were his. He recalled the wooden train, hidden in a bakery sack that would be handed to a little, unsuspecting boy. He recalled Isabella's exhaustion and rage, of the walls she'd built to protect what was most fragile.

"Find her before she reaches the depot," he instructed. "And be subtle. No scenes. Bring me options—recover the child under a monitored exchange if you must. I will not allow him to escape."

The car slid into a row of traffic, and the city blustered by like a living beast. Ethan held his palm on the train in the paper bag, the small weight of it. The ache that had emptied him that night at the bakery coalesced into resolve.

He would not lose a son because some person had rendered a judgment that he was undeserving of being scripted onto a birth certificate. He would not be a phantom in the life of the child whose eyes were his.

He would do something. He would not let go of this child.