THE CEO SECRET HEIR

Chapter 10: The Name He Didn't Say

Mia stared at the headline until the words stopped making sense, until mystery woman had repeated itself so many times in her head it lost all meaning. Her first instinct was panic — a cold, plummeting drop through her stomach at the thought of her face, her name, her son's existence splashed across the internet before she'd even had a full day to process any of it herself.

"They don't have a name," Damian said quickly, reading the fear on her face before she said a word. "It's a grainy shot of me walking off stage. Nobody followed us here. Nobody knows who you are."

"Yet." The word came out sharper than she meant, fear curdling fast into something closer to anger. "This is exactly what I was afraid of. One night, one gala, and already there's a headline."

"I'll handle it." He said it with the same flat certainty he probably used to handle hostile board votes, already thumbing out a message to someone — his chief of staff, she guessed, from the Marcus, call me now she caught a glimpse of before he turned the screen away. "PR will kill the story within the hour. It's speculation with no name attached. It'll die by morning."

"You sound very confident for a man who just found out he has a five-year-old an hour ago."

"I'm confident because I've done this before." Something flickered behind his eyes when he said it — not pride, something closer to exhaustion. "Not this exact situation. But managing what the world thinks it knows about my life. It's most of what my job actually is, underneath the parts that look like running a company."

Mia wrapped her arms tighter around herself, suddenly aware of how thin the walls of the apartment felt, how exposed the whole night had made her. "There's something else you're not telling me."

It wasn't a question. She'd learned, over the last hour, to read the particular stillness that came over him right before he said something he didn't want to.

"There's someone I'm engaged to," Damian said finally, quietly, watching her face for the reaction before he'd even finished the sentence. "Selene Voss. It's — it was arranged. A merger between our families' business interests more than an actual relationship. It's been public for six months."

The floor seemed to tilt slightly under Mia's feet.

"Engaged." She heard her own voice come out flat, distant, like it belonged to someone else. "You're engaged."

"It's not what it sounds like."

"It sounds exactly like what it is." Mia took a step back from him, putting distance between them without fully deciding to, her arms wrapping tighter around her ribs like she could hold herself together through sheer pressure alone. "You stood in my kitchen an hour ago talking about making up for lost time, about being part of Kian's life, about terms and promises — and you didn't think to mention you're engaged to be married?"

"I was going to tell you."

"When?" The word cracked out of her, louder than she meant, and she immediately dropped her voice, glancing toward the hallway where Kian was sleeping, forcing herself back under control. "When were you going to tell me, Damian? Before or after I let you carry my son to bed?"

"It's not real, Mia." He stepped closer, urgency breaking through his composure again. "It was never real. It's a business arrangement my father set in motion before he died, and I've been putting off the wedding for eight months because I never wanted it in the first place. Selene knows it's not real either. It benefits both of our families on paper. That's all it's ever been."

"That doesn't make it not true." Mia's voice shook, equal parts fury and something that felt embarrassingly close to hurt, five years of an old wound tearing open in a new direction she hadn't seen coming. "You're marrying someone. A real wedding. A real ring. And you want to be part of my son's life in the meantime, with her standing right beside you the whole time?"

"I'll end it." He said it fast, immediate, like the words had been sitting ready in his chest the whole night, just waiting for permission to come out. "I should have ended it the moment I found out about Kian. I'm not going to build any kind of relationship with my son while I'm engaged to someone else. That's not the man I want to be for him."

Mia searched his face for the calculation she half expected to find — the CEO angle, the practiced answer designed to smooth over exactly the reaction she'd just had. She didn't find it. What she found instead was something rawer, more desperate, a man clearly working through the consequences of his own life in real time, faster than he was prepared for.

"This isn't just about ending an engagement," she said finally, quieter now, some of the fire banking down into exhaustion. "This is about what kind of life you're asking me to let my son anywhere near. A fiancée. A board. A family with money and lawyers and — what happens when they find out about him, Damian? What happens to Kian when your world finds out he exists?"

Damian didn't answer right away. When he finally did, his voice had dropped low, quiet, and for the first time all night, genuinely afraid.

"I don't know," he admitted. "But I know my family doesn't forgive easily, and they don't forget. If Selene or my uncle find out about him before I control how it comes out, I don't know what they'll do to protect the company's image." He met her eyes, steady despite the fear underneath it. "That's exactly why I need you to trust me enough to let me get ahead of it, before someone else finds him first."

Mia's blood went cold at the words before someone else finds him first, the abstract fear of exposure suddenly sharpening into something with teeth.

Behind them, the small hallway light flicked on, and a small, sleepy voice called out from Kian's doorway, thick with the last dregs of fever and interrupted sleep.

"Mommy? Is the man still here?"

Mia turned, torn between the conversation she desperately needed to finish and the small, exhausted boy standing in the hallway rubbing his eyes — and found Damian already crossing the room toward his son before she could decide which crisis to handle first.