His Second Woman

Chapter 5

James had never called Kaylen, "Daughter."

Today, he did.

"Come home."

For the first time in her life, hope outweighed fear.

She'd stared at the message for a full minute before her hands started shaking, not from cold this time, but from something far more dangerous. Something like belief. She read it again, come home, two words she'd waited twenty-six years to hear from James Bloomberg, and now, on the one morning she least deserved them, there they were, glowing on her screen.

She didn't stop to change out of yesterday's rain-wrinkled dress and didn't bother to think about Clara's smile, or the ring pressed into Xavier's palm, or the strange hollow feeling that had followed her out of that hallway hug like a shadow she couldn't shake. She simply ran.

The Bloomberg mansion looked exactly as it always had; white stone, black gates, gardens clipped into obedience. But something about the silence pressing against it felt wrong the moment she stepped through the door.

No housekeeper greeted her, no even a single assistant hurried past with a clipboard waiting to attend to her and the staff she passed in the hallway dropped their eyes the instant they saw her, turning to busy themselves with anything nearby, a vase, a curtain, a stack of mail so they wouldn't have to look at her directly.

The doors to the living room stood already open, as if they'd been waiting. Kaylen stepped inside and stopped. James sat in his chair by the window, spine straight, hands folded. Caroline stood beside him, arms crossed, chin lifted. Clara sat serenely on the far couch, hands in her lap, eyes lowered like a woman still recovering from heartbreak.

Xavier stood near the fireplace, jaw tight, watching the door. And behind them were family lawyers, board members, faces Kaylen recognized from company dinners she'd never been allowed to speak at.

Nobody said a word.

"James," she started, the old formality slipping out before she could stop it.

“You said–”

James lifted the remote from the armrest without looking at her. The television across the room flickered to life. It was not the bedroom and neither was it the kiss. Just one clip, looping on the screen in grainy hallway light with Kaylen's figure coming to view, soaked to the skin, stepping through Xavier's apartment door at half past midnight.

The room went utterly silent, the kind of silence that has weight, that presses down on the lungs. Kaylen felt every eye in the room shift toward her at once, and none of them were asking a question. They had already decided the answer.

"It isn't what it looks like," she said, but her voice came out too small for the room, swallowed before it reached anyone.

Xavier stepped forward immediately. "This is on me. Whatever anyone thinks happened, I'm responsible."

James didn't even glance at him.

Caroline's laugh cut through the air, sharp and disbelieving. "Unbelievable. She seduces her own sister's fiancé the night of the engagement party, and now she wants sympathy?"

"That's not–"

"Please." Clara's voice arrived soft, almost pleading, cutting Kaylen off before she could finish. "Don't blame her. She didn't know what she was doing. She's always been a little lost, ever since she found out about her mother's death." Clara's eyes shone, glassy with practiced sorrow. "I don't hold it against her."

The room shifted again, this time, very subtle, in Clara's favor. Kaylen watched it happen in real time, watched sympathetic glances land on Clara's bowed head instead of her own, watched the board members' faces soften toward the woman playing the wounded saint. Every gentle word from Clara's mouth was another nail, and Kaylen understood, far too late, that her sister wasn't defending her at all but was burying her, one kind sentence at a time.

James rose from his chair.

For one absurd, desperate second, Kaylen let herself hope that he was finally going to look at her the way a father looks at a daughter who's made a mistake, that he would silence the room, that "Come home" had meant something after all.

He crossed the room slowly and stopped in front of her.

Kaylen searched his face for anything; anger, disappointment and even hatred would have been something. He reached into his jacket instead and withdrew her Bloomberg identity card, holding it up between two fingers for the room to see then he tore it in half.

One piece fell to the marble floor. He tore it again.

The second piece joined the first, scattering at Kaylen's bare feet, the gold Bloomberg crest split cleanly down the middle.

"From today onward," His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "You're no longer a member of this family. You're not my daughter, not anymore."

The words landed harder than any shout could have.

Behind her, without anyone signaling it, the front doors opened. Two security guards stood in the frame. Between them, already packed and waiting, sat Kaylen's suitcase filled, zipped, set by the entrance as though someone had known exactly how this morning would end before she'd even walked in.

Xavier moved toward her. "Kaylen,"

"Don't." James's voice, flat and final, stopped him where he stood.

Kaylen didn't look back at any of them. She bent, gathered the torn halves of her identity card from the floor with trembling fingers, and walked out through the open doors into a morning that no longer had a place for her in it.

.

.

.

The dizziness had started three weeks earlier, and Kaylen blamed it on stress at first, telling herself it made sense after everything with the mansion and the disowning. Then the nausea began arriving every morning without fail, and her clothes stopped fitting the way they used to. She ignored it for as long as she could, until the day she fainted in the stairwell of the cheap apartment she'd moved into, and a stranger had to call an ambulance for her.

Now she sat on the edge of an exam table, the paper beneath her crinkling every time she shifted, waiting for someone to tell her what she already suspected but hadn't let herself think.

The doctor came in reading her chart and glanced at her once before sliding a slip of paper across the desk. An ultrasound request, her name already printed at the top.

He smiled. "Congratulations, Miss Kaylen."

She frowned, not understanding, or maybe refusing to.

"You're going to be a mother."

Her hand froze on the edge of the table, and for a moment she couldn't remember how to breathe. Then her phone buzzed against the paper beside her, the screen lighting up with a name she wasn't ready to see.

XAVIER CROSS CALLING…

She reached for it, but before she could answer, a second message slid down over t

he first.

Unknown Number:

If Xavier learns about this child, you'll both disappear.