chapter 2

Heir to Skyfall

Chapter 2 — The Face on the News

She woke up still in yesterday's dress.

The white silk was stiff with dried champagne, twisted around her hips, one strap hanging off her shoulder. She'd made it as far as the couch before her legs stopped cooperating. Her phone was somewhere under the cushion, buzzing in short urgent pulses that hadn't stopped since she got home.

She pulled it out and looked.

Forty-seven missed calls. Hundreds of notifications. Her name in six headlines she could read without even unlocking the screen. She opened the first video without thinking — and there she was, frozen in her white dress, champagne crashing over her head while a restaurant full of people watched and filmed and laughed. The caption read: Valentine's Day Side Piece Gets Her Due.

She put the phone face down on the cushion.

Three breaths. Four. She flipped it back over.

Her boss had left a voicemail at seven in the morning. She played it with the phone pressed tight to her ear and listened to him explain — carefully, warmly, the way people speak when they've already decided — that given the current media attention and the company's public-facing brand, perhaps it would be best if she took some indefinite time away.

She set the phone on the table and stared at the ceiling.

Rent in eleven days. Sixty-two dollars in her account after the electric bill. A job she no longer had. A video of her face going viral under a headline that made her sound like she'd known the whole time.

She hadn't known. Not one day of it. Nine years of marriage tucked behind his easy smile and his jeweler's bag and his talk about someday settling down, and she'd had no idea. She'd worn white. She'd thought he might propose.

She pressed both hands over her eyes and held them there until the burning passed.

The knock came at half past ten.

She almost didn't answer. But something about it was different — two firm, deliberate raps, not the impatient hammering of a neighbor. She crossed the room and looked through the peephole.

A man she didn't recognize stood in the hallway. Late sixties, silver hair swept back from a broad forehead, dark wool coat, hands clasped at his front. He was standing very still — the kind of still that comes from working hard to appear calm.

She opened the door on the chain.

"Lydia." His voice was low and careful. He looked at her face and something in his own shifted — a window pushed open from inside. "I saw the news this morning."

"I don't know you," she said.

"No." He held her gaze. "But I've been looking for you for twenty-seven years." A pause. "You have your mother's eyes."

She stared at him through the gap. Her mother had been dead since she was four. Lydia had exactly one photograph of her — a woman laughing at something off-camera, dark hair loose around her shoulders, eyes that tilted slightly at the outer corners. The same tilt Lydia saw in the mirror every morning.

She took the chain off.

He sat across from her at the small kitchen table and told her the truth in pieces.

His name was Alexander Voss. He ran a company called Skyfall Empire — a name she'd seen on the side of a downtown building her whole life without once wondering who put it there. He was sixty-eight years old. He said he had never remarried. He said it quietly, like a fact he'd made peace with but still carried.

Her mother's name had been Claire. They'd met when Alexander was thirty-one and she was twenty-four. Within six months he'd known, with the kind of certainty that doesn't negotiate with itself. But he hadn't been free to follow it. His family's company was failing, and the only lifeline was an arranged alliance with a powerful family — the Santas — sealed by a marriage he hadn't chosen. He was told the terms weren't negotiable. He chose the company. Claire paid for it.

"The Santas found out about her," he said. His hands were flat on the table. "Found out she was pregnant. What came next wasn't a legal threat. It was two men sent to her apartment." He paused. "I found out hours before it happened. Enough time to get her out of the city with help from my closest friend — James. Salvador's father. James arranged everything. I promised to follow once I'd neutralized the threat from the inside."

He never made it.

"The night I was supposed to leave, the Santas moved first. James was killed protecting me. His wife was in the hospital in labor." His jaw tightened. "By the time I was free, Claire was already gone. A car accident, three years later. By the time I found you, you were in a foster placement out of state and I had legal challenges from people who wanted me to fail." He looked at her. "I should have been faster. I wasn't."

Lydia sat with both hands wrapped around a glass of water and turned the shape of it over in her head. The mother she'd lost. The father she'd never known existed. Twenty-seven years of distance and a secret powerful people had worked hard to keep buried.

"Why now?" she asked.

"Because I'm not well." He said it plainly, without dramatics. "And because you deserve to know while I can still tell you. And because if I die without naming an heir, my brother Victor takes everything I built." Something hardened in his face. "I won't let that happen."

He slid an envelope across the table. DNA results, dated two weeks ago. Her name beside his. The probability figure so close to certainty it was just a formality.

"I'm not asking you to love me," he said. "I know I haven't earned that. I'm asking you to come home. To take what is already yours."

She looked at the paper. Then at him.

He was watching her with something in his eyes she couldn't name cleanly — hope and guilt layered together, and underneath both of them, the steadiness of someone who has rehearsed this moment for years and is now finding it harder than he'd planned.

His face felt like a door she'd been standing outside her whole life.

She wasn't ready to say yes. But she wasn't saying no.

She pushed her chair back. "Give me twenty minutes to change."

They stepped out of her building into the cold gray morning. Alexander's phone rang before they reached the car. He answered, listened, and went still — not panicked, just still, the way people go still when bad news confirms what they already suspected.

He lowered the phone.

"Victor has called the senior board together," he said. "He's been telling them I have no clear succession plan. That the company is vulnerable." He looked at her steadily. "I'm taking you to the estate tonight. You'll meet everyone tomorrow." He paused. "There's someone there I want you to know. Salvador. James's son. He was raised alongside me after James died — not as an heir, the bloodline is clear on that, but as family. He's been running security and watching over the estate while I've been managing my health." Something close to warmth crossed his face. "He's the only person in that house I trust without question."

Lydia nodded, still turning every layer of the last hour over in her mind.

She had no idea the man who'd caught her wrist in a rain-soaked alley less than twelve hours ago was already waiting behind those gates.