My Boss's Hidden Heir (Elara and Marcus) novel Chapter 220

Just The Two Of Them

Marcus’s POV

The bar Killian had chosen was the kind of place that didn’t need to try. Dark wood, low lighting, the hum of other p conversations providing enough cover that two men could talk without performing it.

Killian was already there when Marcus arrived, sitting at a corner table with a glass of whiskey and his jacket over the the chair, looking like a man who was comfortable waiting because he’d been waiting a long time already.

Marcus sat down. A bartender appeared and he ordered the same thing Killian was having without looking at the me the bartender left and then it was just the two of them.

They didn’t speak immediately. Killian turned his glass slowly on the table and Marcus looked at his hands doing it ar thought about his father’s hands shaking two nights ago.

“You picked somewhere quiet,” Marcus said.

“I find quiet useful when the conversation is going to be complicated.”

“Is it going to be complicated?”,

Killian looked at him. “Yes.”

The drinks arrived. Marcus picked his up and leaned back in his chair and looked at the man across from him properly way he hadn’t been able to in the boardroom with twelve other people in the room and a business agenda running interference.

It was worse up close. The jaw, the way he held his shoulders, the particular quality of his stillness when he was thinking. Marcus had looked in enough mirrors to know what he was looking at.

Killian was doing the same thing. Marcus could feel it, that same cataloguing attention turned on him, two men reading each other for evidence of something they already knew was there.

“You reached out,” Marcus said. “So talk.”

“I’m deciding where to start.”

“Start at the beginning.”

Killian took a drink. Set his glass down. “I built KW Dynamics to be good enough to force your hand. That’s the honest version. Not to destroy Thorne Dynamics, not to take anything from you/To be undeniable enough that a conversation became inevitable.”

“That’s a complicated way to introduce yourself.”

“I didn’t know how else to do it.” Something moved in Killian’s expression. “I couldn’t exactly call your office and say what I needed to say to a receptionist.”

Marcus put his glass down.

“I know about Sarah Wade,” he said. “I know about my father’s affair. I know who you are.”

Killian went completely still.

The bar moved around them, glasses and voices and the low music from somewhere, and the two of them sat in the middle of it absolutely motionless.

My Boss’s Hidden Heir

“How long have you known?” Killian asked. His voice was even but Marcus could hear what was underneath it.

“Two days.”

Killian nodded slowly. “You?”

“Eight months.”

Another silence. Longer this time, with more inside it. Marcus watched Killian process the fact that the advantage h holding for months had been closed in two days, and watched him decide that it didn’t matter the way he’d thought

would.

“Mr. Wellington told you,” Marcus said.

“At a dinner in London. He recognized my mother’s name.” Killian picked up his glass and put it down without drink spent three weeks confirming it before I let myself believe it.”

“And then?”

“And then I felt what I felt and I decided what to do with it.” He looked at Marcus directly. “Your father had everything life, the company, the name, a son who knew exactly who he was from the day he was born. My mother worked three for most of my childhood. She bent over a sewing table at midnight so I could have school shoes.” His voice didn’t rise quieter, which was worse. “She never once complained. Never once asked why or said it wasn’t fair. She just worked.”

“I didn’t know you existed,” Marcus said. “Neither did he.”

“I know that.”

“Then you know that none of what your mother went through was a choice anyone made consciously. My father didn’t choose to leave her. He lost contact with her. He didn’t know.”

“I know that too.” Killian’s jaw tightened. “Knowing it doesn’t change what her life looked like compared to yours. What m life looked like. You grew up with every door open, Marcus. I grew up working out how to open doors that weren’t built f me.” He leaned forward slightly. “I’m not here to blame you. I’m not even here to blame Richard. I’m here because I spen thirty eight years without a father and I built an empire from nothing and I deserved to sit at the same table and I made t happen myself.”

Marcus looked at him for a long moment.

He thought about the scholarship Dante had found in the records, the string of promotions in finance firms that had each come faster than the last, the six years of building KW Dynamics with no family money and no family name and nothing except whatever Killian Wade had inside him that turned pressure into progress.

He thought about his own life. The doors that had been open. The name on the building. The inheritance that had been waiting for him before he was old enough to understand what inheritance meant.

He didn’t say any of it because Killian didn’t need him to. Killian had lived the comparison every day for thirty eight years and understood it better than Marcus ever would.

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

Killian looked slightly thrown by that.

“Not about Richard. Not about intent. But about what it looked like side by side.” Marcus held his gaze. “That’s not something I can argue with and I’m not going to try.”

They sat with that for a moment.

Something in the air between them shifted, subtle enough that Marrus couldn’t have pointed to the exact second it

12:35 Sat, Aug 8

My Boss’s Hidden Heir

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