THE CEO SECRET HEIR

Chapter 3 What She Left Behind

"Don't run from me again."

The words landed in the middle of the kitchen like something dropped from a height, and for a second Mia genuinely couldn't tell if she'd heard them right, if the noise of the extractor fans and the shouting line cook and her own pulse in her ears had scrambled his voice into something it hadn't actually said.

Then he took a step closer, and she knew she'd heard him fine.

"I'm working," she said. It came out steadier than she felt, which surprised her. Years of holding a straight face through worse than this — through landlords, through her own mother's silence, through a positive pregnancy test taken alone in a gas station bathroom — had apparently taught her body to do that much, at least. "I need to get back to the floor before someone notices I'm gone."

"Mia."

"Don't." The word cracked out of her sharper than she meant it to, and a line cook two stations over glanced up before quickly deciding not to have seen anything. She lowered her voice, stepped sideways toward the service corridor that ran behind the kitchen, away from the noise, away from witnesses. "Not here."

He followed. Of course he followed. He'd always been like that — the kind of man who didn't understand no as a full sentence, only as the opening line of a negotiation. She used to find it charming, back when she was twenty-two and didn't know any better, back when she thought a man who refused to let her walk away meant a man who valued her, instead of a man who simply valued winning.

The corridor was narrow, lit by a single buzzing fluorescent tube, lined with stacked crates of glassware and a rolling cart someone had abandoned halfway through a delivery. It smelled like bleach and cold air from the walk-in down the hall. Mia stopped near the far end, arms crossed over the champagne stain still damp on her blouse, and finally turned to face him properly for the first time in five years.

Up close, he looked older in ways the stage lighting hadn't shown. A faint line between his brows that hadn't been there before. Something tired sitting behind his eyes that had nothing to do with tonight's event.

Good, she thought, and hated herself a little for thinking it. Good. I hope it cost you something too.

"You lied to me," she said, before he could get another word out. "Your whole name. Everything. Alex." She said it like it tasted bad in her mouth. "There's no Alex. There's just — this." She gestured vaguely at the banner-lit ballroom beyond the door, the empire attached to his real name, the twenty-five years of excellence he'd apparently been building the entire time he was disappearing on her.

"I never lied about who I was with you." His voice had dropped, low and even, the practiced calm of a man used to controlling every room he walked into — except his hands, she noticed, weren't calm at all. They were flexed at his sides like he didn't know what to do with them now that they weren't gripping a podium. "Alex was real. Everything that happened with you was real. The name was the only thing I ever held back, and I had reasons—"

"Reasons." She laughed, short and humorless. "You disappeared. Six weeks, and then nothing. A number that didn't work anymore. No note, no—"

"I didn't choose that." Something sharp cracked through his composure for the first time, quick and gone. "You think I wanted to vanish on you? My father found out. Everything after that stopped being my choice."

"Convenient."

"It's the truth." He took another step, close enough now that she had to tip her head back slightly to hold his eyes, close enough that she could smell the same cologne from five years ago underneath something newer, more expensive, more him now. "I looked for you, Mia. For months. The number changed, the apartment was gone, it was like you'd scrubbed yourself off the map on purpose."

"I didn't scrub anything." Her voice wavered, just slightly, on the last word, and she hated that too. "I moved because I couldn't afford where I was anymore. That's not the same as hiding."

He opened his mouth to answer, and that was the moment her phone buzzed hard against her hip, still tucked in the uniform's front apron pocket where she'd shoved it before her shift started. Reflex more than thought made her hand move to check it — Mrs. Okoye texted sometimes if Kian woke up asking for her, and five years of single motherhood had trained her body to treat every buzz like a potential emergency, gala or no gala, ex-boyfriend-turned-billionaire or no ex-boyfriend-turned-billionaire.

Her fingers were still damp from the champagne. The phone slipped.

It hit the concrete floor of the corridor with a c***k of glass on stone, screen-side up, skidding half a foot before it came to rest against the leg of the abandoned cart.

The screen hadn't shattered. It had lit up instead, brought to life by the impact, glowing bright in the dim corridor — her lock screen, the one photo she'd set there eight months ago and never bothered to change, because it was the best one she had. A little boy, mid-laugh, gap-toothed and golden-lit by a birthday candle, caught forever in the half-second before he blew it out.

Neither of them moved for a moment.

Then Damian crouched, slow, and picked the phone up off the floor.

He didn't hand it back.

He was still looking at the screen when he finally spoke again, and his voice had lost every trace of the boardroom composure it started this conversation with.

"Mia." His eyes lifted from the photo to her face, and whatever he saw there made the last of the color drain out of his own. "How old is he?"