The silence that followed the voicemail was louder than a scream.
Cole’s voice hung in the air, a toxic vapor. My child. Nowhere you can go. Nowhere I won’t find you.
Audrey dropped the phone onto her desk. It clattered against the wood. Her legs gave out and she sank into her office chair, a puppet with its strings cut.
He was claiming her. He was claiming the baby.
He was branding them both as his property.
She wrapped her arms around her stomach, a primitive, protective gesture. For days, the anger had been a shield. Anger at Kian for his lies. Anger at Cole for his manipulation. Anger at Beatrice for her cruelty.
Now, there was only fear. It was a cold, heavy thing settling in her bones.
She couldn’t stay here. This office, this museum—it was her sanctuary, and he had breached the walls. Her apartment was a fishbowl he stared into at his leisure.
Everywhere she went, he would be there. A shadow she couldn’t shake.
She needed a plan. She needed to think.
Her eyes landed on the calendar on her desk, the neat grid of her life before the explosion. Gala opening. Board meeting. Her doctor’s appointment, circled in red. Her first prenatal visit.
The appointment she had made when she thought the baby was Cole’s.
She felt a wave of nausea. She would have to go. She couldn’t ignore her health. The baby’s health.
She started counting the weeks. How far along was she? Eight weeks? Nine? The doctor would ask about the date of her last period, try to pinpoint conception.
Her mind, the curator’s mind, the mind that organized timelines and cataloged histories, took over. It was a defense mechanism. A retreat into facts to escape the suffocating emotion.
Her last period. It was… late April.
She and Cole had been fighting constantly then. He was traveling for work. A week in Zurich, four days in London. They were barely speaking, let alone sleeping together. Their last time… it had been forced. A strained, obligatory act after a fight, sometime in the middle of the month. It felt like a lifetime ago.
Then came the night of the gala. The first one. The night she’d run from him.
The night she had collided with Kian.
She squeezed her eyes shut, but the memory was burned onto the back of her eyelids. The whiskey at The Crow’s Nest. The raw grief. The way he had looked at her, like he saw every broken piece of her and wasn’t afraid.
The desperate, frantic heat of his small apartment.
A one-night stand.
A single night. A mistake born of heartbreak and too much alcohol.
Her eyes flew open.
She grabbed a pen, her hand shaking so badly she could barely hold it. She scribbled the dates on a notepad.
Cole. Mid-April. Once.
Kian. First week of May. Once.
Her doctor’s preliminary guess, based on her cycle, had put conception somewhere in the last week of April or the first week of May. She had just… assumed. She had blocked out the night with Kian so completely, burying it under a mountain of shame and regret, that she hadn’t even considered it.
But the dates didn’t lie.
The timeline didn’t care about her shame.
Her encounter with Cole was an outlier. A possibility, but a remote one.
The night with Kian… it landed squarely in the most probable window of conception.
The pen slipped from her numb fingers.
It couldn’t be.
The implications crashed down on her. A series of lightning strikes.
Cole’s obsession wasn’t just about losing her. It was about possessing a child he believed was his. A child that might not be.
Kian’s plea to trust him, his quiet war against his mother, wasn’t just about winning her back. It might be about his own child. A child he didn’t even know existed.
And Beatrice. Oh, God. Beatrice, who saw Audrey as a gold-digging parasite. What would she do if she discovered that parasite was carrying the next Sterling heir? She wouldn’t just try to ruin Audrey’s career. She would try to erase her.
This baby… this tiny, innocent life was at the center of a war, and no one even knew the truth.
Not even her.
The fear didn’t lessen. It transformed. It sharpened from a blunt instrument of terror into a fine, cold point of resolve.
She couldn’t live like this. She couldn’t guess. She couldn’t assume.
She needed to know.
She snatched her laptop, her fingers flying across the keys, clumsy and desperate. She ignored the work emails, the museum memos. She typed three words into the search bar.
Non-invasive prenatal paternity test.
Article after article appeared. Private labs. Advanced genetics. A simple blood draw from the mother. Safe for the baby. Results in seven to ten business days.
It was real. It was possible. An answer was waiting, hidden in her own blood.
She found a link for a high-end, discreet clinic on the Upper East Side. The kind of place that valued privacy above all else. The kind of place a Sterling or an Anderson would use. The irony was a bitter pill.
Her finger hovered over the phone number. This was a bell she could not un-ring. Once she knew, she would have to act. There would be no hiding from the truth, no matter how ugly it was.
She looked across her desk.
The small brass key sat there. Kian’s key. A key to his hidden world. A silent offer.
She thought of his letter. I would burn down my entire empire to protect you.
She thought of Cole’s voicemail. Nowhere you can go. Nowhere I won’t find you.
A protector and a possessor. A liar who told the truth and a fiancé who lied about everything.
And she was trapped between them, carrying a secret that belonged to one of them.
She picked up her phone. She dialed the number for the clinic.
“Good morning, Park Avenue Genetics,” a crisp, professional voice answered.
Audrey’s own voice was a hoarse whisper. “Hello. I… I need to schedule a prenatal paternity test.”
“Of course. Can I have the patient’s name?”
She hesitated. Give a fake name. Hide.
But this was the one thing she couldn’t hide from. This was about truth. Her truth.
“Audrey,” she said, her voice growing stronger. “Audrey Wells.”
She made the appointment for the next morning. The earliest they had.
She hung up the phone and stared at the key. The appointment was set. The clock was ticking. In ten days, she would have an answer. An answer that would either hand her over to the monster stalking her, or tie her forever to the billionaire who had broken her heart.
She didn’t know which was worse.