THE CEO SECRET HEIR

Chapter 5 He Has Your Eyes

The ballroom floor felt different when Mia stepped back into it — louder somehow, too bright, like the whole room had tilted three degrees while she was gone. She kept her head down, grabbed a fresh tray from the service station without meeting anyone's eyes, and threw herself back into the rhythm of the job because it was the only thing keeping her upright right now. Smile. Offer the tray. Don't make eye contact with anyone who might ask why her hands were shaking.

"Where were you?" the coordinator snapped, appearing at her elbow out of nowhere. "You disappeared for fifteen minutes. This isn't the time to—"

"Bathroom," Mia said. "Sorry. Won't happen again."

It was a lie, and a bad one, but the coordinator was already moving on to yell at someone else about the wrong garnish on table four, and Mia used the distraction to put as much ballroom between herself and the kitchen doors as she could manage.

She almost believed she'd bought herself some room to breathe. Almost.

She was crossing toward the far side of the room, tray balanced, weaving between a cluster of men discussing something in low, self-important voices, when a hand closed gently but firmly around her elbow from behind.

She didn't have to turn around to know whose hand it was. She felt it in her spine before she felt it on her skin.

"You said fifteen minutes wouldn't happen again," Damian said, low, close to her ear, close enough that anyone glancing over would assume it was nothing more than a CEO exchanging a word with staff. "I'm not finished."

"I have a job to do." She kept her voice flat, kept walking, forcing him to either let go or fall into step beside her. He chose the second option, matching her pace like it cost him nothing, like five-inch heels and a tray full of drinks weren't slowing her down at all while he strolled beside her in handmade shoes.

"I'll have someone cover your section."

"I don't want you to have someone cover my section." She stopped short near an alcove tucked behind a floral display, mostly out of sight of the main floor, and rounded on him properly for the first time since the corridor. "I want you to leave me alone until I've had time to think."

"I've had five years to think, Mia." Something in his voice cracked, just slightly, the practiced calm slipping again the way it kept doing every time this conversation circled back to the same center. "I don't have five more."

"That's not my problem."

"He's my son." The words came out low and fierce, like he'd been holding them in since the corridor and couldn't anymore. "That makes it my problem too, whether you like it or not."

She flinched, just slightly, at the certainty in his voice — not a question anymore, not even really a demand. A fact, stated plainly, like something he'd already run through every calculation in his head and arrived at the only possible answer.

"You don't know that," she said, weaker than she wanted it to sound.

"I saw the photo, Mia." His eyes held hers, steady now, none of the earlier desperation left in them — just quiet, devastating certainty. "He has your smile. Your nose, maybe. But he has my eyes. Exactly my eyes. I'd know them anywhere, because I see them in the mirror every single morning."

She had no answer for that. She'd noticed it herself, of course — had noticed it every day for five years, had caught herself staring at her own son's face sometimes and feeling the ghost of a stranger looking back at her, a stranger she'd spent years trying not to think about. She'd told herself it was nothing. Genetics were unpredictable. Lots of children had brown eyes.

But not eyes exactly like that. Not that particular shade, that particular shape, tilted at the corners in a way she'd only ever seen on one other face in her entire life.

"I need to finish my shift," she said instead of confirming or denying anything, because it was the only sentence she had left that didn't feel like handing him something she wasn't ready to give.

She tried to step past him. He didn't grab her — didn't touch her at all, this time — but he shifted his weight just enough to block the narrow gap between the floral display and the wall, close enough that she'd have had to physically push past him to get through, and something about the sheer immovability of him, of the man he'd apparently become in five years, made her chest tighten with something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite anger either.

"I'm not trying to trap you," he said, quieter now, and for a moment the hardness in his voice gave way to something rawer underneath. "I know how this looks. I know what kind of man my name probably makes people assume I am. But I am not going to stand here and pretend I don't have a son somewhere in this city that I don't know anything about — not his name, not what he likes, not whether he's happy, not whether he's safe." His jaw tightened on the last word, like it cost him something to say out loud. "So no. I'm not letting you walk away from me again without at least that much."

Mia felt something in her resolve start to give, felt the exhaustion of five years alone pressing up hard against the wall she'd built to survive it, and hated how much she suddenly wanted to just tell him everything — the fear, the gas station bathroom, the nights she'd cried into Kian's baby blankets wondering if she was doing any of it right without him.

She swallowed all of it down instead.

"His name," she said finally, quietly, watching something in Damian's face go very still and very focused, like a man holding his breath, "is Kian."

She watched the name land on him. Watched his throat work once, hard, like he was fighting to keep his composure in a room full of people who would absolutely notice if the CEO of Cole Enterprises started crying behind a floral display at his own company's anniversary gala.

"Kian," he repeated, testing the shape of it like it was something precious. Then his eyes lifted back to hers, steady, resolute, terrifying in their certainty. "I want to meet him. Tomorrow."