THE BILLIONAIRE'S HIDDEN HEIRS: HER RUTHLESS RETURN

Chapter 4 — Five Minutes

POV: Adrian Blackwood



Present Day — The Sterling Atrium, VIP Lounge

I didn't decide to follow her. My legs decided, somewhere between watching her hand a hospital wing to a woman who'd humiliated her for sport and watching her walk toward a set of balcony doors like she intended to disappear through them entirely.

"Seraphina."

She went still under my hand before she turned around, and for one full second neither of us moved, which was long enough for me to realize I had absolutely no plan beyond her name.

"Let go of my wrist, Mr. Blackwood."

"We're not doing that again."

"Doing what."

"The formal thing. The surname thing. I watched you spend a million dollars in under a minute and ruin a woman's dress with a sentence. You don't get to call me Mr. Blackwood after that."

Something flickered across her face — not quite a smile, gone before I could be sure I'd seen it. She let me steer her into the empty lounge off the east corridor without further argument, which surprised me more than it should have. The room was quiet, low-lit, the kind of space event planners set aside for donors who needed to cry or negotiate somewhere the cameras couldn't follow. I shut the door behind us.

Twenty-four hours ago I'd walked into her office demanding answers about a hacked presentation and left without a single one, just her voice telling me I had five minutes and a version of her face I hadn't been able to stop thinking about since. I told myself, driving home that night, that it was anger. Standing in that lounge with the door shut and the party noise fading out behind it, I was no longer entirely sure I believed myself.

For a moment neither of us said anything. She stood with her arms crossed near the window, city lights behind her, looking like every version of composed I'd ever seen her manage in a boardroom — except her thumb kept moving against the strap of her clutch, over and over, the one tell I remembered that she'd never quite been able to train out of herself. I used to know exactly what that meant. I wasn't sure I still had the right to.

"Where have you been?" I hadn't meant to lead with that. I'd meant to lead with something controlled, something that sounded like a man in charge of the conversation. Instead it came out like the only thing I'd actually wanted to know for five years.

"Building a company that's currently outperforming yours."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the only answer you're getting."

"Seraphina." Her name again. I was going to wear it out at this rate. "Where. For five years. I had people looking. Investigators, for God's sake. You didn't just disappear, you erased yourself."

"I had help." Her chin came up, that particular tilt I remembered from a hundred boardrooms she used to sit quietly through, back before she'd needed to raise her voice to be taken seriously. "And you don't get to be angry about the effort it took to disappear from a man who told me to leave."

"I didn't tell you to disappear. I told you to leave the property."

"You told me I had five minutes." Her voice didn't rise. It never rose — that was the thing I kept underestimating about her, then and now. "You watched me pick up a suitcase with a broken strap and walk into the rain, and you didn't come after me. Not that night. Not the next morning. Not once in five years. So forgive me if I don't feel obligated to file a change-of-address form."

I didn't have anything to put against that. It was, unfortunately, entirely accurate.

"You could have called," I said anyway, because apparently I hadn't finished humiliating myself for the evening. "One phone call. I would have—"

"You would have what?" For the first time all night, something sharp broke through the composure. "Believed me the second time, when you couldn't manage it the first? Adrian, you had four years of marriage and a woman standing in front of you begging you to look at her, and you chose a folder of paperwork instead. I wasn't going to hand you a second chance to make that decision again."

The silence after that one had actual weight to it.

"I heard you're engaged," she said, before I could recover. "Victoria mentioned it. Future Mrs. Blackwood."

"I never proposed to her."

That landed somewhere I hadn't intended it to. Seraphina's expression didn't change, exactly, but something in the room did — a fractional shift in the air, like she'd been braced for one answer and gotten a different one entirely.

"She wears a ring."

"She wears a ring she picked out herself, put on her own finger, and told enough people about that I stopped correcting it because it was easier than having the conversation." I didn't know why I was telling her this. I didn't know why it felt like the most important sentence I'd said all night. "It's not what people assume it is. It was never going to be."

"Why does that matter to me."

"I don't know. Tell me it doesn't and I'll drop it."

She didn't tell me that.

We were standing closer than the conversation required. I noticed it the way you notice weather changing — not all at once, just a gradual awareness that the air in the room had gotten harder to move through. She smelled like she always had, some version of the same perfume, and it did something to the part of my brain that was supposed to be running a multi-billion-dollar company and was currently doing nothing useful at all.

"You look at me like you're trying to solve me," she said quietly.

"I used to be very good at that. Solving you."

"You were never as good at it as you thought."

"Prove it."

I don't know which one of us moved first. I know that for one suspended second her eyes weren't cold at all, and I know I'd forgotten, somewhere in five years of telling myself I hated her, exactly how much oxygen that particular look used to take out of a room.

There had been a version of us, once, that fit into rooms like this one without trying — her laugh carrying further than it should have, my hand finding the small of her back without either of us thinking about it. I hadn't let myself remember that version in a long time. It was inconvenient, remembering it now, with her standing close enough that I could see the exact place her composure was starting to crack.

"Adrian." Just my name this time, low, almost a warning.

"I know."

Neither of us stepped back. Somewhere behind my ribs I was aware this was a spectacularly bad idea — that I had a woman waiting on me two floors down with a ring she'd bought herself, that the last time I'd stood this close to Seraphina Vale I'd ended up watching her leave in the rain, that nothing about tonight had gone anywhere close to the way I'd planned it when I walked into this building an hour ago looking for a hacker. None of it mattered as much as it should have. My hand had already found its way to the side of her face before I'd consciously decided to move it, and for one absurd second I could have sworn she leaned into it instead of away.

Her phone rang.

She flinched like it had physically struck her, stepping back out of my hand so fast I felt the loss of it in my palm, already reaching for the phone before the second ring finished. Whatever had been building in that room between us evaporated the moment she read the screen.

"It's the school," she said, more to herself than to me, and all the color left her face at once. "Hello — yes, this is — what happened, is he—"

I couldn't hear the other half of it. I could hear enough. A voice on the other end, clipped and urgent in the way people get when they're trying to sound calm about something that isn't. Seraphina's free hand had come up to cover her mouth, and she was nodding at a phone call the other person couldn't see her nod at, the way people do when their body has stopped listening to logic.

"Is he breathing? Is someone with him right now—" A pause, longer this time, agonizing. "I'm ten minutes away. Don't let anyone move him."

I watched five years of carefully constructed composure come apart in front of me in under thirty seconds. I watched the woman who'd just spent a million dollars without blinking start shaking so hard she nearly dropped the phone, and I understood, with a cold certainty I couldn't yet explain to myself, that whatever had just happened at that preschool mattered to her more than anything either of us had said in that entire room — more, possibly, than anything that had happened between us in the five years before it.

"I have to go," she said, already moving for the door.

I was moving before I'd decided to. "I'm driving you."

"Absolutely not."

"You can barely hold your phone, Seraphina. Where's the car."

She stopped with her hand on the door, and for just a second the woman who'd spent a million dollars without blinking looked like she might actually come apart in front of me. Whatever she saw on my face, it wasn't a negotiation she had time to win.

"Fine," she said. "Now. Please."

I had never once, in five years, heard Seraphina Vale say please like she meant it.

I didn't wait for her to change her mind. I had my hand at her back, steering her past a ballroom full of people who would spend the next week talking about absolutely nothing else, out through the front doors and into the cold, toward the car already waiting because I'd never once, in fifteen years, gone anywhere without it running.

"Talk to me," I said, once we were moving. "What did they tell you."

She didn't answer. She was staring straight ahead, jaw tight, both hands wrapped around a phone that had gone silent again, and I understood, watching her, that whatever we'd almost become in that lounge had just been replaced by something with much higher stakes than either of us.