3. Maddox Creed
MADDOX CREED
Ididn’t get no sleep, and spent most of the night staring at the ceiling in a room that wasn't mine. A few times I closed my eyes and tried to force my mind to shut off, but every road led right back to the same place.
By the time the sun started coming up, I completely gave up on sleep.
The house was quiet as I pushed myself out of bed and headed toward the bathroom inside the guestroom I’d slept in last night.
A hot shower usually helped clear my head, but this morning it didn't do shit besides give me something to do.
Twenty minutes later, I was dressed and standing in front of the mirror brushing my hair while looking like a man who hadn't slept in days.
The crazy part was… I still hadn't figured out what the hell I was supposed to do next.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn't dealing with a problem that money could solve or a situation that could be fixed by making a few phone calls. No amount of influence was bringing back birthdays I missed. No business decision was changing what Luciana, my own fucking wife, had done.
Every answer seemed to create three more questions, and none of them led anywhere good.
I grabbed my keys from the dresser and headed downstairs. The kitchen looked exactly the same as it did a few hours ago. The paperwork was still sitting on the island where I left it, every page in the same position.
My eyes lingered on it for a second.
Luciana had either never touched it… Or she touched it and put every damn page right back where it belonged.
Knowing her, it could’ve been either one.
My eyes drifted toward the staircase for a second before I looked away. I didn't even have the energy for another conversation. Hell, I wasn't even sure I could look at her right now without hearing every word she said the night before.
So, I just slipped out the front door quietly, pulled it closed behind me and walked toward my truck. For a second, I just stood here looking back at the house. Years of memories sat behind those walls. Some of the best moments of my fucking life happened there.
Now all I could think about was how much of it had been built while a secret sat right in the middle of everything.
The fucked-up part was that none of this started with Luciana.
It started with me…
One night…
One decision…
One mistake I had convinced myself would never follow me home…
For years, I buried Vegas in the back of my mind and kept moving forward like it never happened.
I never told my wife. Never gave her the chance to decide whether she wanted to stay with a man who stepped outside our relationship.
Instead, I carried the secret myself and justified it because nothing came from it.
At least that’s what I thought.
Turns out something did come from it… a daughter, and now everybody was paying for decisions made almost a decade ago.
I slid behind the wheel and started the truck before letting my eyes drift back toward the house one last time.
That’s when I saw Luciana.
She was standing at the bedroom window upstairs, one hand resting against the curtain as she looked out at me. Even from this distance, I could tell she wasn’t getting ready for the day. She was still in her robe.
For a second, neither one of us moved.
We just looked at each other through a pane of glass that somehow felt thicker than it should’ve.
Then I looked away first, shifted the truck into reverse, and backed out of the driveway.
When I pulled onto the street, I caught one last glimpse of her in the window before the house disappeared behind me, and for the first time since we’d been together, neither one of us tried to stop the other from walking away.
The warehouse was already moving by the time I got here.
A few people stopped to speak as I made my way through the building, but I barely registered half of what was being said. I nodded when I was supposed to nod, answered what needed answering, and kept moving until I finally made it to my office.
The second the door closed behind me, I dropped into my chair and looked out over the warehouse floor on the security camera.
A lot had changed over the years.
When my father was alive, everything revolved around building the empire. Every move was about expansion. Every decision was about making sure the Creed name carried weight long after he was gone.
Now he was gone.
Rozay had stepped away and focused on his own life.
That left me and Kyro holding the shit together.
For the most part, I didn’t mind. The empire fed a lot of families, including my own. It always had.
Still, lately I’d found myself questioning certain parts of it. Not the legitimate businesses. Those were thriving. The warehouses. The properties. The investments. Those businesses practically ran themselves at this point.
It was the other side of things that had started feeling different.
Maybe age had something to do with it.
Maybe soon becoming a father again had something to do with it.
Hell, maybe finding out I had a nine-year-old daughter walking around this whole time was forcing me to reevaluate more than I wanted to admit.
Whatever it was, the things that used to matter didn’t seem as important as they once did, and sitting here staring out across the warehouse floor, I couldn’t help but wonder what my father would’ve done if he were still here.
Then again…
Maybe that was part of the problem.
I wasn’t Apollo Creed, and for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep making decisions like I was.
The second the door closed behind me, I dropped into my chair and stared out the window.
Usually, being here helped.
Work had always been the one place where everything made sense. Problems had solutions. Numbers either added up or they didn’t. Contracts got signed. Deals got made. Everything was straightforward.
Today, none of that shit mattered.
A stack of reports sat on my desk waiting to be reviewed. Three meetings were already on my calendar before noon. Emails continued rolling in one after another, but every time I tried to focus, my mind drifted somewhere else.
To my wife.
The realization of what she’d done still didn’t sit right with me.
No matter how many times I replayed everything in my head, I kept coming back to the same question.
Why?
Not why she’d been angry.
Not why she’d been hurt.
I understood that part.
What I couldn’t understand was how she’d convinced herself this was okay.
Nine years.
Nine gotdamn years.
That wasn’t a mistake.
That wasn’t a bad decision made in the heat of the moment.
That was a choice she’d continued making year after year.
My jaw tightened as I grabbed a pen off the desk before tossing it right back down.
The more I thought about this bullshit, the less sense it made.
Luciana didn’t just wake up one morning and decided to do this bullshit. Then it was too many moving pieces for one person to pull off alone.
Somebody helped her. Maybe several people, and that was the part that kept bothering me.
How many people knew?
The question had been sitting in the back of my mind ever since I left Vegas.
Who set up the meeting?
Who contacted the attorneys?
Who drafted the paperwork?
Who sat in that room while decisions were being made about my child without me even knowing she existed?
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my hand across my beard.
The more I thought about it, the more impossible it became to believe Luciana carried this secret completely by herself.
She wasn’t an attorney.
She wasn’t writing legal agreements.
She wasn’t arranging confidential meetings with security standing outside the door.
People were involved.
People knew.
…and somehow I was the last mothafucka to find out I had a daughter.
A knock at the door interrupted my thoughts.
“Come in.”
My assistant stepped inside holding a folder. “You got ten minutes before your eleven o’clock, and Kyro said he wasn’t going to be able to make it today.”
I looked at her. Then at the folder. Then back at her.
For a second, I couldn’t even remember what the eleven o’clock meeting was about. She must’ve noticed because her expression shifted.
“You alright?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded before placing the folder on my desk and leaving again.
The second the door shut, I pushed the folder aside without opening it, because I wasn’t alright. Not even close, and the fucked-up part was I had a feeling last night wasn’t the end of this.
It was only the beginning.
My eyes drifted toward my phone sitting on the corner of the desk.
For several seconds, I just stared at it.
Then I reached for it, because there was one person who’d already asked me this question before.
One person who’d already seen enough to know something wasn’t adding up.
I pulled up the number and hit call.
The line rang twice before he answered.
“Yeah?”
I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling.
“Remember when you asked if I wanted you to look into my wife?”
The line went quiet for a second, then he said, “Yeah. I remember.”
“Run it.”
He didn’t say anything for a long while this time, almost like he really didn’t want to do it, when he was the one that has suggested it the other day.
Then finally, he said, “A’ight.”
The second we ended the call, another knock at my office door pulled me out of my thoughts.
“Come in.”
The door opened a second later, and the last person I expected to see stepped inside. It was Rozay.
“You look like shit,” That was the first thing his ass said as he walked in and closed the door behind him.
Normally I would’ve told him to go to hell, but I didn’t have the energy for it today.
“Good to see you too.”
Rozay smirked before dropping into one of the chairs across from my desk. “Ain’t heard from your ass in days. Called you twice. Texted you. Figured I’d see if you was dead.”
“I’m alive.”
“Barely.”
I ignored that and reached for a folder sitting on my desk. The numbers inside might as well have been written in another language because I hadn’t retained a damn thing I’d looked at all morning.
Rozay watched me for a second before leaning back in his chair.