“Where is my son?”
And who else on earth expresses four words and seizes your breathing progression completely? Dominic Steele, that’s who is standing there in a cloud of thinning steam with a towel at his waist, plus seven years of unanswered questions sitting behind his eyes like a river of blood waiting for him to thirst for water.
I don’t move because I can’t. My clothes are still pressed against my breasts, my hair is dripping cold water down my back, and my legs have simply decided they are not doing anything dramatic right now. They are just standing here, surviving.
I turn slowly.
And his face is what breaks me open.
I sense a different dimension of Dominic’s look. The look is far different from the anger I spent the entire flight here preparing for, nor the sharp, entitled fury of a man who feels cheated which honestly I could handle. I had whole speeches ready for anger. Bullet points and everything. But anger is not what is sitting on Dominic Steele’s face right now, and that is the problem.
What is there is certainty.
I want to believe he has done the maths. I can see a series of mathematical equations and calculations running through his face. The grey eyes that Ethan woke up with every single morning of his six years on this earth. The age. The morning I vanished without so much as a note on the kitchen counter. All of these clicking into place right in front of me, and there is nothing I can do to unclick it.
My wolf drops to the floor of my chest like a cloud itself falling on the patch of earth.
“Dominic.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.
“Don’t.” His jaw pulls tight. “Don’t say my name like you’re about to talk me down from something. I’m not in a situation to be managed, Sophie.”
I close my mouth.
He releases my wrist, and I hadn’t even noticed he was still holding it until the warmth of his hand disappears. He takes one step back, then folds his arms across his chest. And just waits—like a man with nowhere else to be in the world except right here, right now, getting this answer.
The denial is there. Of course it is. It comes fast and instinctive and ready, sitting right on the front of my tongue neat as you please, and for one full second I actually consider it. I consider looking him dead in his grey eyes and saying no. No, I don’t know what you’re talking about. No, you’ve lost your mind. No, no, no.
But then I look at him properly.
And I see the grief settling in his face—old and worn smooth, like he has been carrying it too long that it now stops feeling like a weight and starts feeling like just a normal part of him. He doesn’t even look angry. He looks like he has addressed a name to a problem that has been hurting him for years without explanation, and the name fits, and that is somehow worse than the hurt ever was.
I have worn that exact face too. A long time ago. In the car when a song comes on that I don’t even consciously connect to him but my chest does. Every single time Ethan tilts his head a certain way and the resemblance lands on me like a stone dropped from a height.
I can’t lie to that face. I genuinely cannot.
“It’s complicated,” I say instead, which is not a lie. It is just a very small piece of truth wearing a trench coat.
A spark shifts in his expression. “I have time.”
“You don’t know what it was like.”
“So tell me.”
“Dom.”
“Tell me, Sophie. I’m right here.”
The steam is completely gone now. The bathroom feels like it has shrunk two sizes. I press my back against the sink and hold the edge of it behind me with both hands because I need something that isn’t going to move while everything else apparently is.
“The morning after that night,” I start. I stop. I look at the floor. Then I try again because I have been carrying this for seven years and my arms are tired. “I came to find you. The next morning. I came because I didn’t know what we were or what any of it meant, and my wolf was saying things I didn’t have words for yet, and I just thought—” My throat pulls tight. “I thought maybe you felt it too.”
He is completely still.
“I found you in your father’s study. You were on the phone. And you said” I breathe. “You said you would never let yourself be tied down by a mate. That you had no interest in being bound to some quiet little nobody your father had dragged into the house.”
The silence is overwhelming.
No sound comes from the drip of the shower. No sound from the hallway. No sound at all. Just that expression sitting between us like a lifeless body on the floor.
Dominic doesn’t move.
And I watch a weight walking across his eyes, like it is going to break him into pieces with the speed of light.
“That conversation,” he says quietly, “was not what you think.”
I laugh, and the laughter is not as a result of finding him funny. The laugh scrapes out of me, humourless. “I was standing in the doorway. I heard you, Dominic.”
“You heard the middle of it.”
“I heard enough.”
“Sophie.” He takes a step forward and I hold my ground even though every single part of me is having a loud disagreement about whether that is the right move. “That call was with my uncle. He had been on my back for months, pressuring me to reject the bond. He had a strategic and approved match picked out for me. The right family, the right bloodline, everything he thought I needed.” His voice is calm, but a weight beneath it is pulling at the seams. “What you heard was me telling him what he needed to hear so he would get off my back.”
I stare at him.
“I didn’t mean any of it.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not lying to you.”
“You want me to believe that after seven years this is how it comes out? In a bathroom? Like, what the fuck? You just casually drop that it was all a misunderstanding?”
“There is nothing casual about any of this.” His voice drops low. His eyes don’t move from mine, not even a flicker. “I have not been casual about this for a single day in seven years.”
My hands start shaking. I look down at them because I don’t know what to do with that statement and I can’t look at his face while I’m holding it.
The mate bond rolls through the space between us like a Cyclone that is low and enormous, indifferent to how inconvenient it is. A wound split open fresh. I feel it in my back teeth.
“I want to know my son, Sophie.” His voice is quiet now. The quietest it has been. “I’m not standing here asking for your permission. I’m only telling you this is what’s going to happen. I want to know him.”
“That is not a matter you get to decide alone,” I say. My voice holds, barely. “And I am not making any decisions standing dripping wet in a bathroom the morning we are burying your father. I need time…”
He looks at me with his long, unblinking look.
Then he nods once.
“You have until after the burial.”
He picks his towel up from the floor, walks out, and pulls the door shut behind him with a soft, clean click.
I stand in the silence he leaves behind and listen to the last drops falling from the showerhead, and my own breathing, and nothing else.
My wolf lifts its head and says one thing clearly, without giving room for argument.
He’s telling the truth.
I didn’t even respond to it. I got dressed with hands that won’t fully cooperate, walk back down the corridor, slip into my room, and close the door. I sit on the edge of the bed, press my palms flat on my knees, and ask myself to think.
My phone lights up on the nightstand.
Unknown number.
I reach for it because I think it is Miriam. I think it is Ethan asking for waffles through my assistant because he has learned to negotiate through third parties.
I read it once.
Then I read it again.
I know about the boy. Leave quietly or everyone finds out what you two are to each other. And mind you, you have just 24 hours.
I am shivering right now, all my body sucked with the freeze of fear. The phone stays in my hand while the room stays exactly as it was. The white roses on the dresser don’t move. And outside the window, I can see the Steele estate waking up slowly, totally unbothered.
And I sit there in the middle of all that stillness with ice water where my blood used to be.
Someone in this house knows about my son.
And who the hell could that be?
