My Boss's Hidden Heir (Elara and Marcus) novel Chapter 219

Richard

5 vot

Marcus’s POV

Richard opened the door in his dressing gown, which meant Marcus had caught him before bed, which meant this conversation was happening now whether either of them was ready for it.

“Marcus.” Richard stepped back to let him in, reading his son’s face the way he’d always been able to. “What happened

“Sit down. Dad.”

Richard sat.

The apartment was quiet, the kind of quiet that belonged to people who lived alone and had made peace with it. Marc always thought his father’s place felt like a man who’d put his real life in storage and was waiting for permission to take back out. Good furniture, good art, nothing warm anywhere.

He pulled out his phone and put it on the coffee table. Dante’s findings open on the screen.

Richard picked it up. He read slowly, the way he read everything, with the full weight of his attention. Marcus watched father’s face and saw the color leave it so completely and so fast it was almost frightening.

Richard set the phone down.

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. He just sat there with his hands on his knees looking at the middle distance li he was watching something Marcus couldn’t see.

“Dad.”

“Sarah.” Richard’s voice came out barely above a breath. “Sarah Wade.”

“You knew her.”

It wasn’t a question but Richard answered it anyway, nodding slowly, still looking at that middle distance. “Before you wer born.” He stopped. Started again. “It was brief. Intense in the way things are when you’re young and you think intensity means permanence.” He shook his head. “She left. Or I thought she left. She stopped returning my calls, stopped coming to the places we used to go. I assumed she’d moved on and 1-” He stopped again.

Marcus waited.

“I didn’t think much about it, it was merely a fling,” Richard said quietly. There was something about her that stayed with me.” He finally looked at Marcus. “She was pregnant?”

“She had a son.”

Richard’s hands on his knees began to shake.

Marcus had prepared himself for this conversation on the drive over, had run through versions of it in his head, had tried to anticipate what his father’s reaction would be. He hadn’t anticipated this. The shaking hands, the color completely gone from his face, the expression of a man watching the consequences of one chapter of his life arrive in the next one decades too late.

“I have a son,” Richard said. “I have a son I never knew about.”

“His name is Killian Wade. He built a company called KW Dynamics from nothing over six years. He’s been positioning at against Thorne Dynamics for months.” Marcus leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I sat across from him in my boardroom yesterday, Dad. He looked me in the eye and told me to ask my father. He already knows everything”

12:35 Sat, Aug 8

My Boss’s Hidden Heir

Richard looked up sharply. “He knows?”

“He knows. He’s known for a while.”

“How? How could he possibly-”

“Wellington told him, I guess, that’s the only possible explanation.” Marcus watched his father’s face process that. “Killi met Mr. Wellington at a business dinner in London. Mr. Wellington recognized his mother’s name because you told hip about Sarah decades ago. You told him about the affair, about the woman you lost contact with, and Mr. Wellington connected the pieces the moment Killian mentioned his mother’s name.”

The silence that followed was the specific silence of a man understanding exactly how far back the roots of something w

Richard stood up and walked to the window, his back to Marcus, his hands clasped behind him. From behind he looked older than Marcus usually let himself notice, the set of his shoulders carrying something that hadn’t been there a year ag

Richard turned around. His eyes were wet, which Marcus had seen exactly twice in his life before this moment. “I need to call him. I need to speak to him, Marcus. Whatever he thinks of me, whatever he’s been told or has figured out on his ow he deserves to hear it from me directly. That I didn’t know. That if I had known-”

“Not yet.”

Richard stopped.

“I need to understand what Killian actually wants first.” Marcus kept his voice level. “He didn’t come here to find a father, Dad. He came here to force a merger with Thorne Dynamics. He built his entire company specifically to back us into a corner and make a meeting inevitable. That’s not a man coming in peace, that’s a man with an agenda, and I need to know how much of that agenda is business and how much of it is something else before you walk into a room with him.”

“He’s my son.”

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