Between Two Fortunes

The Question

Chapter Six

Amara found her voice before he found his next question, and used it to buy herself a little time.

“Not here,” she said, low, glancing past his shoulder at the board members who hadn’t yet noticed the two of them frozen a few feet apart. “Please. Not here.”

Rafael’s jaw tightened. Every instinct in him wanted to push. But Kael was still tugging at his bow tie, still in the dark, five years old and hungry in a room full of adults speaking a language he had zero interest in.

“Fine,” Rafael said. “Not here.” He said it like a promise, not an acceptance, and she caught the difference right away.

“Mom.” Kael’s voice cut through. “Can we get food now?”

“In a minute.” Her hand found his shoulder, steady even though nothing else about her felt steady at all. She looked back at Rafael. “I need to feed him. He gets moody when he’s hungry.”

“I remember,” Rafael said, then seemed almost startled by his own words — he had known this kid for all of ninety seconds.

Something unreadable crossed her face. “I will find you before the night’s over.”

She didn’t wait for him to agree. She took Kael’s hand and steered him toward the buffet, and Rafael stood there watching them go, his heart beating harder than the afternoon his stock dropped eleven points in a single day.

He didn’t approach again for almost an hour.

He told himself it was strategy — give her some room, don’t make a scene at a gala packed with people who would happily sell a story about the Knox heir cornering a woman and her kid. The truth was a lot simpler than that. He needed the hour just to convince himself he hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

He hadn’t.

He kept catching glimpses of them across the room. Kael ate the way every five-year-old eats at a black-tie event — completely not impressed by the food, way more interested in the string lights overhead — and Amara watched him with a kind of constant vigilance Rafael didn’t recognize from anywhere in his own life. Nobody had ever watched him like that as a kid. His parents had hired people for that job.

Every time the boy laughed, or turned his head a certain way, Rafael felt the same jolt run through him. Not a resemblance. A certainty.

He found Darian at the bar and skipped the small talk entirely. “I need you to look at something.”

Darian followed his gaze to the woman in dark green and the boy standing beside her.

“That’s not a something,” Darian said slowly. “That’s a kid.”

“I know what it is.”

“Whose kid?”

Rafael didn’t answer right away. Saying it out loud would make it real — even though it was already real, had probably been real for years, sitting in a house he’d never even seen, raised by a mother he had spent five years trying to talk himself into forgetting.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I am about to find out.”

He caught up to her again near the coat check an hour later, Kael already half-asleep against her shoulder.

“Amara.”

She froze, but didn’t turn away this time. “He’s tired. I need to get him home.”

“Then I will walk you to the car.”

“You don’t need to—”

“I am not asking.”

Something in his tone made her go quiet. She let him fall into step beside her, out into the cool night air, the valet already jogging off to bring her car around.

“How old is he?” Rafael asked again, quieter this time, no audience left to overhear.

Amara shifted Kael against her shoulder, buying herself a few more seconds. “Rafael—”

“Just answer.”

“He’s five.” Fast, like ripping off a bandage.

Rafael did the math without even meaning to. Five years. The gala. The morning he’d woken up alone and left a note on a pillow instead of a phone number, wanting her to be the one who came looking for him.

“Amara.” His voice had gone careful, controlled — the same tone he used in boardrooms right before saying something that would flip the whole room upside down. “Is he mine?”

She didn’t answer.

The valet pulled up right at that moment, headlights washing over both of them, and Amara used the interruption exactly the way she had used every other interruption that night.

“I have to get him home,” she said, buckling a half-asleep Kael into his booster seat with hands that clearly weren’t steady. “It’s late.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.” She composed herself, finally meeting his eyes for the first time since the ballroom. Something in her expression had cracked — not defiance, something closer to fear. “I can’t do this in a parking lot at midnight.”

“Then when?”

“I’ll call you.”

“You said that five years ago too.”

The words landed harder than he had meant them to. Amara went completely still.

“Excuse me?” she said quietly.

“Nothing.” Rafael pulled back. “I didn’t mean—”

“No. Say it again.” An edge had crept into her voice now, sharpening under the fear. “What do you mean, I said that five years ago?”

Rafael hesitated, already sensing he had stumbled onto something he didn’t fully understand yet — a thread he had pulled without meaning to, one that was about to unravel a lot further than he had bargained for.

“You reached out,” he said slowly. “Didn’t you. After the gala. I always figured you had just decided against finding me. But if he’s five, and he is mine, you must have tried telling me. And I never heard a word.”

Amara’s face went pale under the streetlight. “I emailed you. Twice. Called the company line, twice. Nobody ever called back. I figured you got the messages and decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“I never got any messages.” His voice cracked from boardroom calm into something more emotional. “I swear to you. Not an email. Not a call. Nothing at all.”

They stared at each other across the open car door — one person reaching out, one person never receiving it, and sitting somewhere between those two facts was a truth neither of them had ever considered, because neither had any reason to suspect someone else had been listening in the whole time.

“Someone stopped those messages,” Rafael said quietly, mostly to himself. “Someone made sure I never saw them.”

Amara’s hand tightened on the car door. “Who would even do that?”

Rafael didn’t answer. He was already running through a short list of people who had access to his inbox five years earlier — people with real reasons to want him distracted, kept focused on nothing but the company.

A list with exactly one name sitting at the top.

“I need to go,” Amara said, sliding into the driver’s seat before he could stop her. “Please. I need time to think.”

“Amara”

The door shut before he could get another word out. He stood in the circular drive, watching her taillights disappear, catching one last glimpse of Kael’s small silhouette in the back window before the car turned the corner and both of them were gone.

Rafael stood there a long time, phone already in his hand, one name pulled up on the screen, thumb hovering over the call button.

Cassian.

He didn’t call. Not yet. He needed proof first — because if his instincts were right, the betrayal went back five years, and it had cost him every day of his son’s life so far.