THE BILLIONAIRE'S HIDDEN HEIRS: HER RUTHLESS RETURN

Chapter 6 — The Test

POV: Adrian Blackwood

Present Day — Meridian General Hospital

"Not here." Seraphina's voice cut through the silence I'd just detonated like she'd been waiting her whole life to use that exact tone on me. "Not in front of him. Not in front of either of them. If you have something to say to me, you will say it somewhere that isn't a room with a concussed five-year-old in it."

She was right, which was the worst part. I stood there with the words still hanging in the air — you hid my son — and watched her turn her back on me entirely to smooth Alex's hair off his forehead like nothing in the room had happened at all.

"Is he okay?" Aurora had gone very quiet, glancing between the door and her brother, the first real fear I'd seen on her all night.

"Everyone's fine," Seraphina told her, in a voice so steady I almost believed it myself. "The grown-ups are just being loud. Alex, does your head hurt?"

"Only when people yell near it," Alex said, with the dry precision of a kid who'd clearly noticed everything and was choosing not to say so yet. Beside him, Aurora tucked the blanket higher over his shoulder without being asked, her small face set like she was standing guard.

Shame hit me a beat late. I'd raised my voice in a room with an injured child in it, and the child had noticed. Whatever I'd been trying to accomplish, terrifying my own son on the worst night of his life wasn't it. I stepped back into the hallway before either of us said anything else.

I called the specialist myself, from the hallway. Standing still wasn't an option anymore. Dr. Margaret met us within the hour, calm in the specific way good pediatric doctors learn to be so the parents in the room don't spiral. She ran the scans, checked his pupils, asked him to count backward from twenty. He did it correctly, then asked to see the scan images himself "for accuracy." She confirmed what the school nurse had already told us. Mild concussion. No fracture. Rest and observation. Nothing that required admission.

"He's going to be fine," she told Seraphina directly, ignoring me almost entirely, which I appreciated more than I could have explained. "Watch him tonight. Wake him every few hours. If anything changes, you call."

I paid for a private room anyway, for the twenty minutes it took to be sure, because it was the only thing in that entire building I still had the power to control.

Aurora fell asleep in the waiting room chair with her head on Seraphina's arm sometime around midnight. Alex, cleared and grumbling about being kept from his tablet "for medical reasons that seemed excessive," went quiet somewhere around the same time, worn down by the kind of exhaustion that finally catches up to five-year-olds after enough adrenaline burns off.

I stood by the window for a while, watching them sleep, and tried to remember the last time I'd watched anyone sleep without wanting something from them first. I couldn't.

I used the silence to call my attorney.

"I need to know what's required to establish paternity for custody purposes," I said, low enough that it wouldn't carry past the hallway. "Assume the mother is uncooperative."

"Adrian, it's midnight."

"I'm aware of the time, Marcus."

"Is this real? You have a kid?"

"I have two. Allegedly." The word tasted wrong the second I said it. "One of them is currently asleep forty feet from me with an ice pack taped to his head, so I'd appreciate you treating 'allegedly' as a formality and not an actual point of debate."

"Right. Okay." I heard him sit up, papers shifting somewhere on his end. "Walk me through what you actually want here — a paternity test for peace of mind, or a paternity test as a legal instrument."

"Both. I want it in a form that holds up if this ever needs to go in front of a judge."

"That's a different, slower, uglier process than a peace-of-mind test, and it tends to go badly for the parent who pushes it first. Judges don't love aggression in custody matters, even from men who are technically right."

"I don't care how it looks."

"You will," Marcus said, "the first time her attorney uses the word 'estranged' in front of a family court judge and makes you sound like a stranger showing up to claim property."

I didn't have an answer for that one. He walked me through it anyway — court-ordered testing, timelines, the specific, brutal mechanics of how a man goes about proving, on paper, what he already knew the second he saw a five-year-old's jaw do something his own had been doing since he was that age.

I hated every part of the conversation. I had it anyway. Apparently this was still who I was — a man who reached for lawyers before he reached for anything softer, even with two children forty feet away that I'd apparently fathered years before I found out. My own father would have approved of the instinct. That thought didn't sit as comfortably as it once would have.

There had been a version of tonight where I walked into that hallway and simply told her I was sorry, and meant it, and let that be the whole of what I said. I hadn't done that. I wasn't entirely sure, standing there with Marcus still talking in my ear about court dates, that I remembered how.

Seraphina found me in the corridor when the nurse came to say Aurora and Alex could both go home.

"We need to talk," I said.

"We really don't."

"Seraphina."

"You want to have this conversation now? Fine." She kept her voice low, glancing once toward the room where the twins were being untangled from monitor leads, and stepped further down the hall so they wouldn't hear. "Say what you came here to say."

"I want a paternity test. Officially. On record, through my attorney, with results that hold up if this ever needs to go in front of a judge."

"No."

"That wasn't a request."

"I'm aware." Something in her had gone very still, the same stillness I remembered from the driveway five years ago, except this time it wasn't grief underneath it. It was resolve. "You can subpoena a lab result if you want to spend six months in court waiting for a piece of paper to tell you something. I won't stop you. But you are not walking into my children's lives waving a legal document instead of an apology, expecting that to count as showing up."

"This isn't about an apology. This is about my son having my name."

"He has a name. It's Alexander Vale. He's had it his entire life, and it's kept him safe, fed, and loved." Her voice finally cracked, just slightly, right at the edge. "You don't get to decide, five years late, that a different name matters more now, just because it's convenient for you."

"It was never convenient for me either." The words came out rougher than I meant them to. "I found out I have a son in a nurse's office an hour ago. Forgive me if I don't have a polished response ready."

Something in her face shifted, just slightly, at that — the first crack of something that wasn't pure fury. For a second I thought she might actually let the wall down far enough for either of us to say something true.

"I know this isn't fair to you," I said, quieter. "None of it. I know that."

"Adrian—"

"I'm not trying to take them from you." That much, at least, was true even to me as I said it. "I don't know what I'm trying to do yet. I just know I can't walk out of this hospital and go back to not knowing they exist."

For one moment neither of us said anything. It might have gone somewhere different if I'd let it. But the silence stretched a beat too long, and thirty-two years of training kicked back in — the part of me that had always treated stillness as weakness — before I could stop it.

"Which is why I need this handled properly," I said, and watched whatever had almost opened between us close again like a door.

"Through counsel. On the record."

Her expression went cold so fast it was almost admirable.

"You had it," she said quietly. "Right there. And you chose the lawyer instead."

"You had five years to prepare for the possibility that you might have destroyed something you couldn't undo. I'm not particularly sympathetic that the timeline moved faster than you liked."

I wanted to argue with that. I couldn't find the angle. She said the true thing plainly, and I stood there holding the wreckage of whatever argument I'd walked in with. I was starting to suspect this was just how it would feel from now on — showing up ready for a fight, and losing it the second she opened her mouth. She'd spent five years turning grief into precision. I'd spent mine turning it into a corner office.

"I'm not going away," I said instead, because it was the only honest thing left. "Test or no test. Court or no court. I'm not going away, Seraphina."

"Then I suppose," she said, already turning back toward the room where the children were waiting, "we'll both find out exactly how far you're willing to go to prove it."

I watched her walk away from me for the second time in one night, and thought, with a kind of grim clarity that didn't feel like victory at all, that I had absolutely no idea how to answer that question in a way that wouldn't cost me everything twice.