THE CEO SECRET HEIR

Chapter 7 The Ride Across Town

"No." The word came out of Mia before she'd even fully processed the offer. "Absolutely not."

"Mia, it's nearly eleven at night, you're panicking, and you took a cab here." Damian's voice had none of the boardroom smoothness left in it — just blunt, fast urgency, already reaching for his phone. "My car is out front. It'll get you there in eight minutes instead of twenty-five."

"I don't need—"

"Your son has a fever of a hundred and two." He said it flatly, without cruelty, just fact laid bare to cut through her pride the fastest way he knew how. "Every minute matters more than your feelings about riding in a car with me right now."

She hated that he was right. Hated it with the particular, helpless fury of someone whose fear had already made the decision for her before her pride could catch up. She didn't answer him — just turned and walked fast toward the ballroom's main entrance, coat forgotten somewhere behind the coat check counter, uniform blouse still damp with champagne she hadn't had time to think about since the corridor.

He was beside her within three strides, already texting someone — his driver, she assumed — thumb moving fast across the screen without looking up.

"You don't even know where I live," she said, half out of breath from the pace he'd set without seeming to notice he'd set it.

"Then tell me on the way."

They came through the front doors into the cold night air, and a sleek black car was already idling at the curb, a driver stepping out to open the rear door before Damian had even fully raised his hand to signal. Mia hesitated for exactly one second — one full second of every instinct in her body screaming that getting into a car with Damian Cole was possibly the single worst decision she could make tonight, on top of every other worst decision she'd apparently already made — and then she got in anyway, because Kian's fever didn't care about her instincts.

Damian slid in beside her, and the door shut with a soft, expensive thud that sealed out the noise of the street.

"Address," he said.

She gave it, voice clipped, and watched him lean forward to relay it to the driver with the kind of quiet, unhurried authority that probably got things done in half the time anyone else could manage. The car pulled away from the curb smoothly, gliding into traffic like the city simply parted for it.

For the first two minutes, neither of them spoke. Mia stared out the window, arms crossed tight over her stomach, running through every possible scenario in her head — Kian's fever spiking further, Kian crying for her and not understanding why she wasn't there yet, Mrs. Okoye's voice gone thin with worry in a way it never was.

"Has this happened before?" Damian's voice, quiet, careful, cut through the silence. "Fevers like this?"

"Twice." She didn't look away from the window. "Once when he was two, once last winter. He runs hot when he's fighting something off. It's usually nothing, but—"

"But you still worry every time."

"Every single time." The admission came out rawer than she meant it to, exhaustion cracking through the wall she'd been holding up all night. "You don't get used to it. People say you do. You don't."

He didn't answer that right away. When she finally glanced over at him, she found him watching her with an expression she couldn't quite name — something between guilt and grief, like he was doing the math again, the same math from the corridor, except this time it wasn't just is he mine, it was how many nights like this did I miss.

"I should have been there," he said quietly. It wasn't quite an apology. It was something rawer than that.

"You didn't know he existed." She said it flatly, without softening it for him, because some petty, exhausted part of her wanted him to feel the full weight of it rather than let him off easy. "You can't apologize for missing something you didn't know was there."

"I can still mean it."

She had nothing to say to that. The car turned onto her street, familiar and narrow, lined with the same cracked sidewalks and flickering streetlamp that had been broken for eight months because the landlord kept promising to fix it and never did. It looked smaller somehow, seeing it through the window of a car worth more than the entire building probably was.

"You can drop me here," she said, already reaching for the door handle before the car had fully stopped. "You don't need to come up."

"I'm not letting you go up there alone in this state."

"He's my son."

"He's mine too." The words came out steady, absolute, no room left in them for argument. "I'm not asking permission to care whether he's okay, Mia. I'm telling you I do."

She didn't have the energy left to fight him on it — not with Kian's fever burning hot in her mind, not with twenty-five minutes' worth of adrenaline finally catching up to her all at once. She got out of the car without answering, and he followed a step behind, matching her fast pace up the cracked front steps and into the dim, narrow stairwell that smelled faintly of someone's dinner three floors up.

Mrs. Okoye's apartment was on the second floor, and Mia was already fumbling her keys out before she'd even reached the landing, hands shaking now in a way they hadn't in the ballroom, in the corridor, in any of the last hour's confrontations. Fear for Kian cut through every other fear tonight with a clarity nothing else could match.

She let herself in without knocking, calling his name before the door had even fully swung open — and stopped dead in the doorway.

Mrs. Okoye stood in the small living room, a damp cloth in one hand, Kian curled against her shoulder in pajamas printed with cartoon dinosaurs, cheeks flushed bright red, dark curls stuck damp to his forehead. He lifted his head at the sound of the door, eyes glassy and exhausted, and the second he saw Mia his whole small face crumpled with relief.

"Mommy," he said, voice thick and hoarse, already reaching for her.

Behind her, in the doorway, Damian went completely, utterly still.

Because Kian had turned his head at the sound of a second set of footsteps behind his mother — and for the first time in his life, laid eyes on his father.