Chapter 5 : Confronting The Devil

The private elevator didn't go down. It went up.

Sophia clutched Lily tighter as the elevator rose one more floor, to the 51st floor - a floor that didn't even exist on the public buttons, a floor that only Ethan's fingerprint could access. The doors opened directly into a home.

No, not a home. A palace in the sky.

Floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere, marble floors so clean Lily could see her reflection, a giant kitchen with an island bigger than Sophia's entire studio apartment, toys that had never been touched still in boxes in the corner, as if someone had bought them hoping a child would one day come.

"This... this is your house?" Sophia whispered, her voice echoing in the huge, empty, cold space. It was beautiful, but it was lonely. Like its owner had been lonely for five years.

"Our house," Ethan corrected, setting Lily down gently. Lily immediately ran to the windows, her tiny hands pressed against the glass, looking at all of New York below her, gasping with joy. "I built this penthouse two years ago. I told the architect to add a child's room. I didn't know why. I just... I kept dreaming of a little girl with blonde curls and blue eyes. Now I know why."

Sophia's tears started again. She couldn't stop them today. "Ethan, we can't stay here. This is too much. Too fast. You don't even know us. You don't know Lily likes only chocolate ice cream with sprinkles, you don't know she is scared of thunder, you don't know I work night shifts and—"

"I want to know," he interrupted, walking to her, his hands cupping her face so tenderly, his thumbs wiping her tears. His touch was so gentle, so different from the cold CEO downstairs. This was her Ethan. The boy from the dorm room. "I want to know everything, Sophia. Every fever, every first word, every time she cried and I wasn't there to hold her. Tell me everything. Punish me with it. I deserve it."

Before she could answer, his phone rang. A sharp, cold ringtone. He looked at the caller ID and his face turned to ice again, colder than ever before. The tenderness vanished, replaced by pure, murderous fury.

MOTHER.

He answered on speaker without hesitation, his eyes never leaving Sophia's.

"Ethan darling! Where are you? The board meeting—" a polished, cruel female voice purred from the other side, the voice of a woman who owned half of Manhattan.

"Where am I, Mother?" Ethan's voice was deadly calm, too calm, the calm before a hurricane destroys everything. "I'm with my daughter. My four-year-old daughter that you told me was aborted. I'm with the woman you told me took fifty thousand dollars to disappear and called my love a mistake."

Dead silence on the other end. Then a sharp intake of breath.

"Ethan, I can explain— that girl was after your money! You were grieving your father! I was protecting the empire! She was a nobody, a scholarship girl from Queens—"

"She is the mother of my child!" Ethan roared so loud that Lily turned from the window, scared, and Sophia rushed to hug her. He immediately lowered his voice, breathing hard, his free hand in a fist. "You stole five years from me! Five years of my daughter's first steps, first words, first birthday! You let Sophia live in poverty! You let my child, a Blackwood, live in a roach-infested studio while we have forty billion dollars! Do you know what she went through? Do you know she worked as a waitress while pregnant with my heir?"

Sophia stood frozen, holding Lily, watching the man who was destroying his own mother for them.

"Listen to me, Margaret Blackwood," Ethan said, his voice now low, final, like a judge passing a death sentence. "You are no longer Chairwoman of Blackwood Enterprises. I have removed you from the board as of five minutes ago. My lawyers are freezing your personal accounts. The Hamptons house, the Paris apartment, the private jet - all company property. They are revoked. You will be left with your trust fund, nothing more. If you ever come near Sophia or Lily again, if you ever speak their names again, I will make sure you have nothing. Not even that. Do you understand me, Mother?"

"Ethan! You can't do this! I'm your mother! I built this company with your father!" she screamed, her perfect voice cracking.

"You stopped being my mother the day you took my family from me," he said, and hung up. He threw the phone across the room, smashing it against the marble wall into a hundred pieces.

The penthouse was silent except for his heavy breathing.

Then Lily walked over, her tiny legs wobbling, and tugged his expensive suit pants. "Prince sad again?"

Ethan looked down, and all the fury melted instantly. He picked her up again, holding her like she was his entire world, because she was now.

"No, princess. Prince is happy. For the first time in five years, Prince is happy. Because his princesses are home."

He looked at Sophia over Lily's head, his blue eyes pleading, vulnerable, full of love and regret and hope.

"Sophia Miller, the girl who tutored me in Business Ethics and laughed at my bad jokes, the only girl I ever loved," he whispered, his voice shaking. "I know I don't deserve you. I know I left you, even if it wasn't my choice. But please. Give me a chance to be a father to Lily. Give me a chance to be a man for you. Stay. Not as my assistant. As my family. Let me take care of you both. Let me make up for five years in the next fifty years. Please."

Sophia looked at her daughter, safe and giggling in the arms of her father who finally found her, looking at the home with warm lights that was no longer cold, looking at the man who had just burned his own empire for them.

She had come to Blackwood Tower this morning with $42.18 and an eviction notice, ready to beg for a job.

Now she had a daughter who had a father, and a billionaire on his knees begging for her.

"What do you say, Mommy?" Lily whispered, looking at Sophia with hopeful big blue eyes. "Can we stay in castle? Prince said ice cream castle!"

Sophia laughed through her tears, a real laugh for the first time in five years, bright and beautiful like sunshine after a long storm.

"Yes," she whispered, looking at Ethan, at her prince who finally came back. "We can stay."

Ethan's face broke into the first real smile in five years, the same lopsided, charming smile from NYU that made her fall in love with him in the first place.

And in that moment, fifty-one floors above New York, a broken family became whole again, and a new story began.