The Mark He Refused To Claim

CHAPTER 4

I smoothed down my blazer in the elevator mirror on my way up to the fortieth floor of Titan Tower, running through my pitch one more time under my breath, the way I always did before a meeting that mattered.

Six years of building this business from nothing had taught me how to walk into any room like I belonged there, even the ones specifically designed to make people like me feel small. Marble floors. Glass walls stretching three stories high. A reception desk staffed by someone whose entire job seemed to be deciding, at a glance, whether you were important enough to acknowledge. I told myself, watching the floor numbers climb, that this boardroom would be no different from any of the dozen others I'd walked into over the years with nothing but a portfolio and my own stubborn refusal to shrink.

I had no idea yet how wrong I was.

"Ms. Ashworth. Right this way," the assistant said, gesturing toward a pair of frosted glass doors at the end of a hallway lined with framed photographs of championship fights I recognized from a life I'd spent six years trying to forget existed.

I stepped through them with my chin up and my portfolio held steady against my chest, and my whole body went cold, instantly and completely, the moment I saw the man standing at the head of the table.

Dane Kestrel.

He was broader now than the boy I remembered, harder somehow, every soft edge of the eighteen year old who'd once handed me a napkin for a split lip long since burned away and replaced with something sharper. He wore a dark suit that fit him like it had been built directly onto his frame, his hair cut shorter and sharper than I remembered, and even from across the room his presence pressed against me like an actual physical weight settling onto my shoulders.

He turned. Our eyes met. The pen he'd been holding snapped clean in half in his fist, and the sound seemed to echo through the entire silent room.

"Nora?"

His voice hit something in me I had spent six years carefully burying under waitressing shifts and late night design work and the exhausting, all consuming project of raising a child alone. I forced my spine straight, forced my feet to keep walking toward the table like nothing in the world had just cracked open somewhere deep inside my chest.

"Mr. Kestrel." My voice came out cool and even, a small miracle given how hard my heart was slamming against my ribs. "Ms. Ashworth, lead designer for the campaign your team reached out about. Shall we begin?"

"Where have you been?" Dane stepped around the table entirely, ignoring the three stunned executives who were watching the exchange with poorly concealed confusion. "Six years, Nora. My people searched for months after you disappeared. There was nothing. No trace."

"I'm here to discuss a branding contract," I said, holding his gaze without flinching, refusing to let six years of hard won composure c***k in front of an audience. "Not ancient history."

"Nothing," Dane said, quiet enough that only I could hear it, "about you is ancient history to me."

Before I could find a response that wouldn't betray exactly how much those words landed, my phone rang, loud and jarring in the tense silence of the boardroom. Milo's gym.

"Ms. Ashworth," the trainer's voice was tight with worry the moment I answered, "you need to come down here right away. Milo got into it with another kid on the mats, and the boy's father is threatening to call the police."

My blood went cold instantly, every other concern in the room evaporating. "I'm on my way."

I snapped my portfolio shut without a second thought and walked out of that boardroom without a backward glance, but Dane's long strides caught me at the elevator bank before the doors could close.

"Who is Milo?" he demanded, stepping in beside me before I could stop him, close enough that his scent, that same warm cedar I hadn't let myself think about in years, filled the small space entirely.

"None of your business," I snapped, watching the floor numbers fall with a kind of desperate focus, refusing to look at him directly.

"Everything about you is my business," Dane growled low, and I felt the old pull flare unwelcome and electric in my chest, a sensation I had told myself for six years I would never feel again.

The elevator hit the ground floor and I bolted the moment the doors opened, Dane right behind me despite every instinct telling him he should let me go, all the way to Rossi's Gym three blocks over, where a small, anxious crowd had already gathered around the ring.

A large man was shouting at the trainer, jabbing one finger toward the mats with the kind of red faced fury that made several onlookers take a careful step back. "That kid attacked my son! Doesn't even have proper gear, who lets a kid like that train here in the first place?"

Standing in the center of the ring, chin held high and small gloved fists still raised, was Milo.

"He said my mom couldn't afford real equipment," Milo shouted back, not backing down a single inch despite being half the size of the boy across from him. "I just knocked him down once. He started it!"

The man lunged toward the ring, and I sprinted forward with every ounce of speed I had left in me, but a blur of motion tore past me before I could reach the ropes.

Dane.