Chapter 2

Colton's POV

I didn't sleep.

I sat in my hotel suite until four in the morning and I didn't touch the bed. I sat by the window with a glass of whiskey I barely drank and I thought about grey eyes on a four year old face and I thought about Mara walking out of that event like she had somewhere to be and I thought about the three weeks I spent looking for her four years ago before I finally stopped.

I stopped because continuing felt like weakness. I told myself I was done. I told myself she had made her choice and I had made mine and that was the end of it.

It wasn't the end of it. I knew that now.

I had built an entire identity around not needing people. My parents died when I was nineteen and I learned that night that the things you love most can be taken without warning and without reason. So I stopped holding things too tightly. I built Vance Group from nothing, made my first hundred million before twenty-six, and kept every person in my life at a distance that felt like safety. It worked. It worked perfectly until Mara Ellis showed up in scrubs at a charity event and argued with me about ventilators and somehow became the one person I couldn't keep at arm's length no matter how hard I tried.

I had tried. She had no idea how hard I had tried.

And then she was gone and I had filed it away and moved forward because moving forward was the only thing I knew how to do.

The child changed everything.

I wasn't angry in the way people might have expected. I wasn't loud about it. What I felt was something quieter and more dangerous than anger, a cold, settled fury that came from understanding exactly what had been taken from me. Four years. A daughter I didn't know existed. A little girl who had been growing up somewhere without my name attached to her life in any real way. That was not an accident. That was a choice Mara made and dressed up as protection.

I didn't believe the story. People didn't just receive threatening letters and vanish overnight without a single attempt to tell the person they claimed to be protecting. If someone had genuinely threatened her because of me, the logical thing, the honest thing, was to come to me. I would have handled it. I had the resources and the reach to handle almost anything. She knew that. She had known me long enough to know exactly what I was capable of.

She didn't come to me. She ran. And she took my child with her.

I called Dominic at six in the morning.

He picked up on the second ring, which told me he had been awake too. Dominic had a habit of knowing when something was wrong before I told him. Older brother instinct, he called it. I called it useful.

I told him everything. The event, Mara, the child, the eyes. I told him what I needed. He was quiet for a long moment after I finished talking.

"Colton," he said carefully.

"I'm not asking for your opinion," I said. "I'm telling you what's happening and what I need you to do."

Another pause. "You're sure."

"I'm sure."

He exhaled. "I'll have the paperwork ready. But I need you to think clearly about how you handle this. If the child is yours…."

"She is mine."

"If she is," he continued, steady as always, "then how you proceed in the next seventy-two hours sets the tone for everything that follows. You understand that."

I understood it perfectly. That was precisely why I had already decided what I was going to do.

********************

Mara arrived at the testing clinic at nine in the morning with the child on her hip and her jaw set in that particular way I remembered, not defiant exactly, more like braced. Like she had already decided she was going to get through this no matter what it cost her. She had always carried difficulty that way. Quietly and without asking anyone for help.

I was already inside. She stopped when she saw me and the child looked at me with open curiosity and said good morning the way children do, completely unaware of the weight of the room.

I said good morning back. It was the most words I had exchanged with a four year old in my entire adult life.

The test was quick. A technician handled everything efficiently and without drama. Mara kept her eyes forward through most of it and only looked at me once, briefly, when the technician stepped out. I looked back at her and said nothing. There was nothing useful to say yet.

Results in forty-eight hours.

We walked out separately. I was almost at my car when I heard her behind me.

"Colton." Her voice was tight. "I need you to understand that whatever that test says, she doesn't know anything about this. She's four. She has no idea who you are. Whatever you're planning, you have to think about what this does to her."

I turned around. "You had four years to think about what this did to her. You made your choices. Now I'm making mine."

She flinched. It was small but I saw it.

"I left to protect you," she said. "I know you don't believe me but that is the truth."

"You left and had my child alone and said nothing," I said. "Whatever your reasons were, that's what you did. And in forty-eight hours when those results come back, we're going to have a very different conversation."

She held my gaze. Her eyes were wet but she didn't let anything fall.

"What kind of conversation?" she asked.

"The kind," I said, "where you don't have many options."