THE CEO SECRET HEIR

Chapter 15 Not Safe Anymore

Mia was still awake when the knock came at her door, well past ten, Kian long asleep in the next room after a quiet evening of soup and cartoons that had almost let her forget the entire day had happened at all.

She checked the peephole out of habit before opening it, and found Damian standing in the dim hallway light, jaw tight, a folder clutched in one hand like it weighed more than paper had any right to.

"It's late," she said, opening the door only partway.

"I know. I wouldn't have come if it could wait until morning." His voice was low, controlled in a way that didn't match the tension in his shoulders. "Can I come in? Five minutes. Then I'll go."

She hesitated, then stepped back to let him through, closing the door softly behind him so as not to wake Kian. He didn't sit. He stood in the middle of her small living room, and for a moment he simply looked at the folder in his hand like he was steeling himself to hand it over.

"Selene had you followed," he said finally, holding it out. "Both of you. I don't know for how long."

Mia's stomach dropped as she took it, flipping it open with hands that had gone cold despite the warm apartment. The photographs inside hit her one after another — the bakery counter, the daycare gate, the park bench from that very afternoon, close enough to make out the exhaustion on her own face in the last one.

"She's been watching us." Her voice came out flat, disbelief and fear tangled together. "For how long, Damian?"

"I don't know. Long enough to have this ready the moment I told her I intended to end things." He dragged a hand through his hair, something close to helpless in the gesture. "She made it very clear tonight that she intends to control how this comes out, on her terms, not mine. Not ours."

Mia closed the folder, hands shaking now, and set it down on the small table like it might burn her. "What does that mean. What is she actually going to do."

"I don't know that either. That's what frightens me." He finally met her eyes, and whatever composure he'd walked in with cracked fully open. "But I know I'm not willing to find out by waiting around in an apartment with a lock any determined photographer could get past, in a building with no security, in a neighborhood where anyone with a camera and a tip could show up at your door before either of us even knows it's coming."

Mia felt the direction of the conversation shift and braced herself for it before he'd even finished the thought.

"Say it," she said. "Whatever you came here to ask. Just say it."

"Move into the estate." He said it fast, like ripping off a bandage. "Both of you. There's security there Selene can't just walk through, cameras, a gated perimeter, staff who answer to me and no one else. I can't protect you here. I can barely protect you in a park in broad daylight, apparently."

"You want us to move in with you." Mia's voice climbed, disbelief cracking through the exhaustion. "Yesterday I found out your real name. Two days ago I didn't even know you were alive, let alone a billionaire with a fiancée who has private investigators following my five-year-old to daycare. And now you want us to just move into your house."

"I know how it sounds."

"Do you?" She crossed her arms tight, putting the width of the small room between them. "Because it sounds like exactly the kind of thing a man does when he's used to solving every problem by throwing enough money and control at it until it disappears. I am not a problem for you to manage, Damian. Neither is my son."

"That is not what I—" He stopped himself, exhaled hard, tried again, quieter this time. "I'm not trying to control you. I'm trying to keep you both safe from people who have already shown me tonight exactly how far they're willing to go. I don't have a better answer than the one I'm giving you. If I did, I'd offer it instead."

Mia stared at him for a long moment, the photographs on the table between them a silent, damning argument she couldn't fully talk herself out of no matter how much she wanted to refuse him on principle alone. She thought of Kian at the daycare gate, unaware a stranger's camera had been trained on him. She thought of the eviction notice sitting unpaid on the counter behind her, the rent she was already three weeks late on, the thin lock on her own front door that had never once felt like enough protection until tonight.

"If we do this," she said finally, voice tight, "it's not permanent. It's not you deciding my life for me. The second I decide it's not working, we leave, and you don't fight me on it."

"Agreed."

"And Kian doesn't find out who you really are to him. Not yet. Not until I say he's ready."

"Agreed." Damian's voice had gone quiet, careful, like he understood exactly how much this was costing her to say yes to. "Thank you."

Mia looked past him toward the hallway where Kian slept, unaware his entire small world was about to change overnight, and felt something cold settle into her chest that had nothing to do with fear of Damian anymore, and everything to do with fear of what Selene Voss might still be capable of.

"When," she asked quietly.

Damian's phone buzzed before he could answer — sharp, urgent, cutting through the fragile agreement they'd just reached. He glanced at the screen, and Mia watched his face go pale in the lamplight.

"Tonight," he said. "It has to be tonight. That was building security. Someone with a press badge just tried to talk their way past the front desk of your building, asking for you by name."