Loving the Enemy's Son

Chapter Four: Blood Before Anything

Elena Reyes did not raise her voice. She never had to.

"Explain to me," she said once the car door had shut and the driver had pulled away from the curb, "why my daughter is keeping company with Richard Wade's son."

Sophia kept her eyes on the window, watching the city slide past in smears of light, and tried to keep her voice as level as her mother's. "It's not what you think. We met by accident. We didn't know—"

"Didn't know." Elena's laugh was short and humorless. "You expect me to believe that in a city of nine million people, you stumbled into a bookstore three weeks in a row and happened, by pure accident, to fall into conversation with the one boy whose name should have made you run in the other direction at first sight."

"I didn't know his last name until tonight." Sophia turned to face her mother fully now, something hot and defensive rising in her chest. "Would it have mattered? You've never told me what actually happened, Mom. Twenty years of 'the Wades ruined us,' and I don't even know what they did. I don't know why Dad—" She stopped herself, her throat tightening around a subject that was never, ever discussed in this family.

Something flickered across Elena's face—old grief, carefully buried, briefly surfacing before she smoothed it away. "You don't need the details to know the shape of a wound," she said, quieter now; somehow that quiet was worse than the anger. "Richard Wade destroyed this family. He took your father's company, your father's reputation, and in the end, your father's health—piece by piece—until his heart simply gave out under the weight of it. I buried my husband because of that man's greed. I will not bury my daughter's future the same way."

"That's not fair," Sophia said, though even as she spoke, she could hear how thin it sounded against her mother's grief. "Ethan isn't his father." "Every son becomes his father eventually," Elena said. "It is only a question of time." She reached over and took Sophia's hand—not gently, but with the fierce, controlling grip of someone protecting what she had left. "You will not see him again. I have lost enough to that family. I will not lose you to it as well."

Sophia didn't answer. She looked back out the window and said nothing at all, and if her mother mistook the silence for surrender, that was, for now, easier than the alternative.

Across the city, the conversation in the Wade penthouse was considerably louder. "A Reyes." Richard Wade said the word as if it tasted foul in his mouth. "My own son sneaking around with a Reyes for weeks, and I had to hear about it from Elena's assistant before I heard it from you."

"I didn't know who she was." Ethan kept his voice steady through sheer force of will. "Not until tonight."

"That's not the point!" Richard's hand came down flat on the desk, hard enough to rattle the crystal decanter beside it.

The point is that the moment you knew, you should have walked away and never looked back. Instead, you stood there in front of half the city's investors, looking like a man who had been caught doing something he was ashamed of. Do you have any idea what that does to how people see this family? To how people see you as my successor?

"Maybe I'm tired of being your successor," Ethan said before he could stop himself. "Maybe I'm tired of every decision in my life being about what serves the Wade name instead of what I actually want."

Richard went very still. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to something colder and more dangerous than shouting. "Everything you have — this apartment you'll inherit, the company you'll run, the name that opens every door in this city — exists because I spent twenty years rebuilding what the Reyeses tried to destroy. You want to throw that away for a girl you've known for three weeks?"

"I don't know what I want yet." Ethan met his father's eyes and didn't look away. "But I know I'm done letting you decide it for me." He left the office before his father could answer, before either of them said something that couldn't be unsaid. He walked the eleven blocks back to his apartment in the cold because he needed time to stop shaking. Neither of them called the other that night. Neither of them knew yet whether there was anything left to say. Sophia lay awake, staring at her ceiling, replaying her mother's words—your father's heart simply gave out under the weight of it—and felt, for the first time in her life, the full shape of a grief she had never been allowed to ask about. She had grown up in the aftermath of a story no one would tell her, only its consequences: her mother's iron control, her brother's watchfulness, and the particular silence that fell over any room where their father's name came up. She had built her understanding of the Wades entirely out of her mother's certainty and her own imagination. Now there was a face attached to the name.

A voice. A boy who had knelt in the rain for a stray cat and asked her questions as if her answers actually mattered. She didn't know how to hold both truths at once—the villain her mother had spent twenty years describing and the boy who had made her laugh for the first time in longer than she could remember.

Three miles away, Ethan sat on the floor of his apartment with his back against the couch, a glass of water he hadn't touched sitting beside him, turning over his father's words with the same restless dread. Every son becomes his father eventually. He didn't want to believe that. He refused to believe it. But some small, honest part of him understood, for the first time, exactly how much his father had built his entire identity around a hatred so old it had outlived whatever original injury caused it—and Ethan didn't yet know how deep that inheritance ran in his own blood.

He pulled out his phone twice that night, typing and deleting the same three words — are you okay — because he didn't know if he had the right to ask, didn't know if she'd want to hear from him at all, and didn't know anything except that the thought of never seeing her again felt like a door slamming shut on something he hadn't finished discovering. Neither of them slept much. In the end, neither of them deleted each other’s number.