All Chapters of OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Alexander scans the room again. Slowly. The way he learned to scan rooms thirty years ago when he was building the first version of himself that mattered. Not looking for a face. Looking for the absence of one. The negative space where someone should be but has deliberately made themselves not be.The man is gone. Of course he is. Men like that do not stay in rooms longer than necessary. They deliver messages and disappear before anyone can ask the questions that matter.Sophia is still beside him. Waiting. She has learned not to push when he goes still like this. But this stillness is different from the ones she has cataloged, and she knows it. He can see her noticing. The fourth register. The one he thought he had buried so deep it would never surface in front of anyone again."We need to leave," Alexander says."Now?""Yes."He does not explain. He takes her hand and moves toward the exit. Not running. That would draw attention. But deliberate. Fast enough that people step aside wi

I wake before Sophia. The room is still dark, but the city outside is beginning to lighten at the edges. Dawn is an hour away. I have been awake for longer than that. Lying still so I do not wake her. Thinking about the letter in my desk drawer and the man who wrote the final page.James Carver. I have not thought about that name in thirty years. My father mentioned him exactly three times that I can remember. Once when I was eight and asked why we never had visitors. Once when I was ten, I found a photograph in my father's desk of two men standing in front of a building I did not recognize. Once when I was twelve and my father told me that if anything ever happened to him, if he ever had to leave and could not come back, I should remember that some people disappear because staying would hurt the people they love more than leaving ever could.I did not understand what he meant at the time. I thought he was being dramatic. Parents did not just disappear. They stayed. They worked. They

James Carver does not look surprised when we approach. He looks like he has been waiting. Like he knew exactly when we would arrive and exactly when we would cross the room to him. He sets his champagne glass on the tray of a passing server and turns to face us fully."Mr. Kane," he says. His voice is quiet. Measured. The voice of someone who has spent a lifetime saying only what needs to be said. "Miss Bennett. I wondered how long it would take you to find me.""You made it easy," Alexander says. "You wanted to be found.""Yes. I did."I study him up close. He is older than I thought when I saw him at the gallery. Mid-seventies maybe. But he moves like someone younger. There is a stillness to him that reminds me of Alexander. Not the same kind. But from the same place. The stillness of someone who learned early that movement draws attention and attention can be dangerous."Is my father alive?" Alexander asks. No preamble. No buildup. Just the question that has been sitting between us

I wake up before Alexander again. This is becoming a pattern. He sleeps later now than he did when I first moved in. Back then he was always awake before dawn, working in his office or on the phone with Marcus or standing at the kitchen counter with coffee and the weight of an empire on his shoulders. Now he sleeps until the light comes through the windows. Until I move beside him or get up to make coffee or just lie there watching him breathe.I think he sleeps better because I am here. I do not ask him if this is true. I just notice it the way I notice everything about him now.I get out of bed carefully so I do not wake him. The flip phone is still on his nightstand where he set it last night. Small. Old. The kind of phone no one uses anymore unless they are trying to stay hidden. I look at it for a long moment. One call. That is all it would take. One call and Alexander would hear his father's voice for the first time in thirty-five years.But he said not tonight. And I understand

I find Alexander in his office three hours later. He is sitting at his desk with the letter spread out in front of him. All the pages. The ones his father wrote when Alexander was a child. The final page James Carver added was He is not reading them. He is just looking at them like they are a puzzle he is trying to solve.I knock softly on the doorframe even though the door is open. He looks up."Can I come in?" I ask."Yes."I cross the room and sit in the chair across from his desk. The same chair I sat in the night we read the final page together. The night we learned his father was alive and watching and had been pulling strings for two years to make sure we found each other."How are you doing?" I ask."I do not know yet.""That is fair."He leans back in his chair. Runs his hand through his hair. He looks tired. Not physically. Emotionally. The kind of tired that comes from holding yourself together through something that should have broken you but did not quite."I thought it w