My Boss's Hidden Heir (Elara and Marcus) novel Chapter 218

Not ask me. Not I’ll explain. Ask your father. Like Richard already had the answer. Like whatever Killian knew he’d decide it belonged to Richard to say out loud first.

Marcus picked up his phone and called Dante before he’d fully finished the thought.

Dante answered on the second ring. “I was going to call you.”

“I need everything on Killian Wade. Not the company, the man. Background, family, where he grew up, who his mother Everything that exists.”

“How deep?”

“As deep as it goes.”

A pause. “Give me a few hours.”

Marcus hung up and looked at Elara, who was watching him with the expression she got when she was putting things together herself.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet.” He picked up his phone again and then put it back down. “He said ask your father.”

“I heard him.”

“In a room full of people he’d never met, in the middle of a business meeting, he looked at me and said ask your father.” Marcus shook his head slowly. “That’s not something you say to a stranger.”

“No,” Elara agreed. “It’s not.”

They drove home mostly in silence, the comfortable kind that meant they were both thinking rather than the uncomfortable kind that meant something was wrong. Maria had the twins in the garden when they got back. Alexander attempting to kick a ball with more enthusiasm than coordination, Catherine sitting at the small table they’d put outside examining a leaf with the focused seriousness she applied to most things.

Marcus stood at the garden door watching his son kick the ball directly into the hedge and felt some of the tension in his chest loosen slightly.

He changed out of his suit and sat at the kitchen table with his laptop while Elara made tea and they existed in the same space without needing to fill it, the way they did on evenings when the day had been heavy and the house itself was enough.

At some point Alexander climbed into Marcus’s lap and fell asleep there, which was both inconvenient and the best thing that had happened all day.

Elara looked at the two of them from across the table. “He has your jaw,” she said quietly.

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Because it’s true.”

Marcus looked down at his son’s face, slack and peaceful in sleep, and thought about jawlines and inheritance and the things that passed between people without anyone deciding they should.

12:35 Sat, Aug 8

My Boss’s Hidden Heir

His phone rang at half past eight.

Dante.

Marcus shifted Alexander carefully to the couch and stepped into the hallway. “Tell me.”

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“I found something.” Dante’s voice had the particular quality it got when he was choosing his words carefully. “Killian Wade’s mother. Her name is Sarah Wade. She’s sixty three, lives in Connecticut now, worked multiple jobs most of her life.” A pause. “Marcus, I ran her name through some old records. Personal records, correspondence, things from your father’s early years that are archived with the company’s founding documents.”

Marcus leaned against the wall.

“I need you to sit down,” Dante said. “I found a connection to your father.”

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My Boss’s Hidden Heir

Ask Our Father

Killian’s POV

“He looks so much like Richard.”

Mr. Wellington was quiet on the other end of the line for a moment. Killian could hear the older man’s breathing, slow evenly, the way it always got when he was processing something he hadn’t expected.

“You’re sure?”

“Same jaw. Same way of moving through a room.” Killian loosened his tie and dropped onto the hotel suite couch, stari the ceiling. “I sat across from him for an hour and kept having to remind myself he didn’t know. He kept looking at me. something wasn’t adding up and he couldn’t find the equation.”

“Did you tell him?”

“I told him to ask his father.”

Mr. Wellington made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “That must have gone well.”

“He handled it the way he handles everything apparently. Filed it away and kept working.” Killian pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. “He’s good, Wellington. I need you to know that going in. Whatever picture Julius painted of Marcus Thorne, the reality is a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“Julius painted no picture,” Mr. Wellington said, and the warmth left his voice the way it always did when Julius came up now. Sudden and complete, like a light switching off. “Julius simply told me what happened. That family’s chaos got my s killed and I don’t need a picture for that.”

Killian sat up.

This was the part of these conversations he never knew how to navigate. Mr. Wellington’s grief was the kind that had calcified over months into something harder and more dangerous than sadness. Július had been everything to him, only son, the person the entire Wellington legacy was supposed to pass to, and now Julius was gone and the older man had decided very cleanly who was responsible.

“I know,” Killian said carefully.

“Do you? Because you just spent an hour in a room with the people responsible for my son’s death telling me how impressive they are.”

“I spent an hour in a room with them because that’s what we agreed. You wanted me inside their walls. Wellington. That’s what I’m doing.”

“I wanted you to destroy them.”

“And I will.” Killian stood up and walked to the window, Manhattan spread out below him in the early evening dark. “But not the way you’re thinking. If I go at Marcus Thorne directly, if I make it personal and visible, he’ll see it coming and he’ll close every door. The merger is the way in. I get inside the company, I get access to everything, and then we decide what we do with it.”

Silence on the other end.

Killian had met Mr Wellington at that London dinner the same night the older man had told him about Richard Thorne, about Sarah Wade, about the affair that had produced a son nobody knew about. That conversation had changed the entire shape of Killian’s life in the space of an hour and he understood that Mr. Wellington had done it deliberately, had looked at this young man across a dinner table and seen someone with his own reasons to want the Thorne family destabilized

My Boss’s Hidden Heir

He hadn’t been wrong.

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But Julius had still been alive then. Julius had been in the room that night actually, moving between conversations wi easy charm that had made him one of the best connected men in London’s finance circles, and afterward he and Killi sat/at the hotel bar until two in the morning and Julius had told him everything.

About Marcus. About Aurora. About the years of schemes that had never quite worked, about the humiliation of watc his sister reduced to desperate manipulation while Marcus Thorne built his perfect life with his perfect wife and his p children.

Julius had been funny about it, which was how he was about most things, but underneath the humor was something re old and genuinely painful. He’d loved his sister. Watching her fall apart had cost him something he never fully recover

Killian had listened and understood because he had his own version of that story. A mother who’d worked herself to exhaustion. A blank where a father’s name should have been. A life built from nothing while someone else had everyth

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