His Secret Heirs

Chapter Six

Vin’s POV

Marco's reports started arriving every evening at nine, a habit that had settled into place after the first week without either of us discussing it out loud. Nothing invasive; I'd been specific about that just enough to know she was safe. What time she left the hospital. Whether the walk home looked the way it always did. Whether the twins seemed happy at drop-off, at pickup, running the ordinary small distances of ordinary small lives.

I told myself I was reading them for security purposes.

I was reading them because some part of me that I didn't have a name for had become unable to stop.

7:14 PM subject departed St. Adeline's, walked to cousin's residence, collected both children, appeared in good spirits. Boy fell asleep on the walk home; subject carried him the last four blocks.

I read that particular line more times than I'd like to admit, sitting alone in my office with a glass of scotch I wasn't drinking, picturing a woman I'd known for one night three years ago carrying a sleeping three-year-old my son four blocks through the Bronx heat because she had no one else to hand him off to.

I could have sent a car. I thought about it more than once. A driver, discreet, no explanation given, just make her evenings easier, make the walk shorter, make some small unseen difference in a life I had no right yet to touch. I didn't do it. Anonymous kindness from a stranger was the kind of thing that got noticed, got questioned, and I wasn't ready not yet, not while I was still deciding what kind of man I intended to be in this to have those questions asked before I was prepared to answer them.

So I watched instead. From exactly the distance I'd promised Marco I'd keep.

It was, without question, the hardest discipline I had ever imposed on myself.

I've sat across tables from men who wanted me dead and felt less unsettled than I did reading a report about my daughter's blue rain boots purchased new, subject appeared to have budgeted carefully for the expense, previous pair visibly outgrown because somewhere in that single clinical line was an entire story about a woman raising two children on a nurse's salary, counting pennies for shoes I could have bought a thousand pairs of without noticing the cost.

I thought, more than once that week, about simply ending the careful strategy altogether. Walking into that hospital, finding her, telling her everything who I was, what I knew, what I wanted to do about it, and letting the pieces fall wherever they fell. It would have been easier, in some ways. I am not built for patience; I haven't had to force myself into it. Every instinct I've spent a decade sharpening told me that hesitation was how you lost things that mattered.

But this wasn't a rival family. This wasn't territory I could take by force and hold through sheer will.

This was a woman who'd built an entire careful life specifically not needing a man like me in it, and two children who had no idea, yet, that the ground under their small ordinary world was about to shift. If I moved wrong too fast, too hard, with the same blunt certainty I brought to every other decision I made, I stood a real chance of losing all three of them for good. Not to danger. To her own good judgment, closing a door I hadn't yet earned the right to walk through.

So I watched. And I waited. And I let the reports pile up on my desk like a slow, quiet education in a life I was only beginning to understand I wanted to be part of.

"You're different," my sister said, when she came by the penthouse that Thursday, dropping into the chair across from my desk with the easy familiarity of someone who'd known me since before I had to be anyone important. Gianna had always been able to read me faster than anyone else alive, a skill I found useful exactly never.

"I'm the same as I've always been."

"You're distracted." She studied me with the particular narrowed focus that meant she wasn't going to let this go. "You canceled dinner with the Marchettis. You never cancel on the Marchettis. What's going on with you?"

I considered, briefly, telling her the truth. Gianna was the one person in my life whose judgment I trusted without reservation, whose loyalty had never once been in question, who might actually understand the strange, careful thing I was trying to build without it becoming ammunition for anyone else in this family.

I decided against it. Not yet.

"Work," I said instead.

She didn't believe me. I could see it in the way her eyes narrowed further, cataloging the lie for later use. But she let it go, because she was as good at strategic patience as I was, and because some part of her I'd learn later, when everything finally came apart, had already started to suspect something was different long before I was ready to admit it myself.

I went back to the reports after she left. Read the same line about the rain boots twice more than was reasonable. Told myself, again, that this was strategy, that this was patience, that this was the careful, disciplined work of a man who did not lose what mattered to him.

I did not yet let myself examine how much it had started to feel like something else entirely.