His Secret Baby

The rent was due in four days, and Aria Morgan had exactly sixty-three dollars to her name. She counted it twice behind the café counter that morning, as if the number might change the second time. It didn't. Sixty-three dollars, a mother in a hospital bed three miles away, and a nurse who kept using words like "dialysis schedule" and "transplant list" like they were normal things a twenty-two-year-old should be able to handle. She wasn't handling it. She was surviving it, which was a different thing entirely. "You're doing the thing again," said Nadia, dropping a tray of dirty mugs into the sink beside her. "The staring-into-space, math-in-your-head thing." "I'm not doing a thing." "You've refilled that same coffee pot three times. It's empty. You keep pouring nothing into cups." Aria looked down. The pot was, in fact, empty. She set it back on the burner and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for exactly two seconds — long enough to remember she didn't have time to fall apart, short enough that Nadia wouldn't call her out on it. "I need the hotel shift tonight," Aria said. "Whatever it pays." "It's a corporate thing. Some tech merger party. Big tips if you can stomach rich people." "I can stomach anything for the right price." She meant it. She'd learned that about herself over the last year — that there wasn't much dignity left to protect once you'd watched your mother's hands shake from a treatment neither of you could afford, and smiled anyway because someone had to keep smiling. The Regency's top-floor lounge glittered like something out of a different planet. Chandeliers threw gold light across marble, and every glass on every tray cost more than Aria made in a week. She moved through the crowd with a tray of champagne, invisible in the way service staff were trained to be invisible, and tried not to do the math on how much this one party could have covered. She noticed Adrian Knight before she knew his name. He stood near the windows, apart from the cluster of executives orbiting him, the kind of stillness that wasn't calm so much as controlled. Every few seconds someone approached to shake his hand, and every time, his expression didn't change. Aria had waited on enough rich men to know the type — bored, untouchable, allergic to anyone beneath a certain tax bracket. She didn't expect to notice him again. But an hour later, she did. He was leaning against the same window, except now his jaw was slack and his eyes weren't tracking right. A man in a navy suit stood close beside him, gripping his elbow with a familiarity that looked less like friendship and more like control. "Just a little air, Adrian," the man was saying, low enough that Aria only caught it because she was refilling a glass two feet away. "You're not feeling well. Let's get you somewhere quiet before the cameras notice." Adrian mumbled something Aria couldn't hear. His knees buckled slightly. The man in navy caught him, laughing loudly for the benefit of anyone watching — had one too many, folks, nothing to see here — and Aria's stomach turned cold. She'd seen drunk before. Countless nights of drunk, stumbling, slurring, sloppy drunk. This wasn't that. His pupils were wrong. His hands were trembling in a way that had nothing to do with liquor. Someone had put something in his drink. She didn't know why she moved. Maybe it was the two reporters she'd clocked near the elevator bank, phones already angled toward the window where Ravenswood City's most photographed bachelor was swaying on his feet. Maybe it was the flash that went off somewhere behind her, quick and hungry, the kind that ruined lives before breakfast. Or maybe it was simpler than that — nobody deserved to be photographed at the worst, most helpless moment of their night, whatever kind of man he was. "Sir." She stepped in before the man in navy could react, sliding under Adrian's other arm like she'd been hired to do exactly this. "Let's get you some air, sir, you look like you need to sit down." The navy-suited man's eyes flicked to her, calculating, then relaxed. A waitress. Harmless. He let go of Adrian's arm without protest, already turning to intercept the reporters with a plate of practiced apologies. Adrian was heavier than he looked, and barely conscious enough to walk. Aria half-carried, half-steered him toward the service elevator, praying no one would ask questions about a waitress escorting a billionaire out of a party. "You're—" he mumbled against her shoulder, voice thick and slurred. "You're not real. Nothing's real right now." "You're fine," she said, though she had no idea if that was true. "Just walk. One foot, then the other." The elevator doors slid shut, sealing them into sudden quiet. Adrian's head dropped against the mirrored wall, eyes fluttering, fighting to stay open. "Someone put something in your drink," Aria said quietly, mostly to herself, because she needed to say it out loud to believe it. "I saw his face. That man wasn't helping you. He was covering something up." Adrian didn't answer. His breathing had gone slow and even, and for one terrifying second Aria thought something worse was happening — that this was more than a spiked glass, that she should be calling an ambulance instead of standing in a mirrored box with the city's most powerful CEO slumping against her shoulder. Then his eyes opened again, glassy and unfocused, and found her face for the first time. "Who are you?" he whispered. The elevator chimed. The doors began to open onto the private floor. And in the gap of silence before anyone else appeared, Adrian Knight reached up, gripped her wrist with more strength than a drugged man should have had left in him, and said the last thing she expected. "Don't let him find me." Behind them, at the far end of the hallway, the elevator doors on the opposite bank were already sliding open — and the man in the navy suit stepped out first.