The doctored photo burned on her screen. The words He will abandon you too were a brand on her soul.
Cole wasn’t just a threat anymore. He was a ghost, haunting her from the inside out.
Kian hung up the phone, his face grim. The magnate’s armor dissolved as he turned to her, his eyes full of concern. “Audrey?”
She shoved the phone into her pocket, burying the evidence. She couldn’t show him. She wouldn’t let Cole’s poison seep into this space, the only safe ground she had left. To show Kian would be to admit Cole still had power over her.
“It was just Jenna,” she lied, the words tasting like ash. “Cole’s sister. Being… Jenna.”
Kian’s jaw tightened. He knew the name. He knew what it meant. He didn’t press. He just nodded, accepting the lie she needed to tell.
“The next ten days are going to be a war,” he said, his voice low. “My mother and Cassandra on one side. Cole sniping from the shadows on another. But they are outside. In here,” he said, gesturing to the small apartment, “it’s just us. We hold the line here.”
She looked at him, the man who was fighting a multi-front war for her, and made a choice. She would not be the weak link. She would not let the ghosts win.
“Okay,” she whispered, her voice finding a sliver of strength. “Just us.”
The ten days were hell.
The world was a screaming match of speculation. Cassandra Thorne’s face was everywhere—tabloid covers at the grocery store, morning show segments, endless social media chatter. She was the wronged woman, the brave single mother. Kian was the villain.
Audrey became a ghost in her own life. At the museum, she was a specter of professionalism. The Aethon Pendant was a stunning success, drawing record crowds and glowing press, but she could feel the whispers that followed her down the marble halls. She saw the pitying looks, the curious stares. She was the other woman in a scandal that was growing bigger by the day.
Kian was a general. He barely slept. He moved into her condo—the one Cole had poisoned—and turned it into a war room. His security team swept it for bugs, changed the locks, and stood guard in the lobby. For the first time, the glass walls felt like a fortress, not a cage.
He was a blur of motion and command. Conference calls with London. Strategy sessions with New York. His legal team filed a cease and desist. His PR team issued a single, terse statement: “The allegations are false and defamatory.” His private investigators dug, their work a silent, invisible current moving beneath the surface of the world.
But at night, the general disappeared.
In the darkness, he was just Kian. He would crawl into bed, his body thrumming with exhaustion, and pull her against him. He’d bury his face in her hair and just hold her, his breathing the only sound in the room. They wouldn’t talk about the scandal or the test. They would just hold on, two people adrift on a tiny raft in the middle of a hurricane, waiting.
On the tenth day, her phone rang.
A private number.
She and Kian were at the breakfast bar, pushing food around their plates. The call made them both freeze.
She answered, her thumb shaking. “Hello?”
“Ms. Wells? This is Marcia from the Gen-Sure Clinic. Your results are ready for collection.”
The world stopped.
“Thank you,” Audrey managed to say. “I’ll… we’ll be there this afternoon.”
She hung up.
Kian was watching her, his face pale, his knuckles white where he gripped his coffee mug. Everything they had been fighting for, everything they feared, was waiting for them in a sealed manila envelope.
“Let’s go back to my place,” he said, his voice raspy. “The apartment. Where it’s just us.”
She nodded. It was the only place that felt right. The only place that was truly theirs.
The drive to the docks was silent. The city felt muffled, distant, as if they were moving through a dream. Kian’s hand found hers, his grip tight, a lifeline.
He waited in the car while she went into the clinic. The receptionist handed her the envelope. It felt impossibly heavy. It contained a whole universe, an entire future.
Back in the car, she placed it on the dashboard between them. A silent bomb.
Neither of them spoke.
He unlocked the door to his apartment, the place where she’d first told him, the place where he had made his vow. He didn’t turn on the lights. They stood in the center of the room, shadows in the afternoon sun slanting through the window.
He turned to her. “No matter what it says,” he said, his voice raw with emotion. “Nothing changes. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’m scared,” she whispered.
“I know. Me too.” He took the envelope from her trembling hands. His own were shaking just as badly.
He tore the seal. The sound was deafening in the silence.
He pulled out a single, folded sheet of paper. Official letterhead. A series of names and numbers that meant nothing. And then, at the bottom, a single section.
PROBABILITY OF PATERNITY.
He held it so they could both see, his arm wrapped around her shoulder, pulling her in tight against his side. She held her breath, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs.
Her eyes scanned the jargon until they found the names.
Alleged Father: Kian Sterling. Child: Unborn.
And then the final line. The truth in black and white.
Probability: 99.999%.