Chapter 18
Someone had been in my apartment.
I knew it before I knew anything else. The key bowl on the entry table had shifted, just slightly, sitting a few inches from where I was certain I’d left it.
I stopped in the doorway and stared at it for ten seconds, replaying the morning in my head.
Had I knocked it with my bag? Brushed against the table?
Forgotten, somehow, that I’d moved it myself?
My hand hovered over the bowl before I nudged it back into place and stepped inside.
The open-plan living area was dim, the curtains still drawn against the morning light.
My gaze went instinctively to the kitchen nook on the left.
I moved to get some water, setting my bag on the counter.
That’s when I noticed: the sink was empty.
The dirty dishes from last night were gone.
A low hum came from the dishwasher, already mid-cycle.
I turned slowly back toward the living room. This time, my gaze caught on the high-backed armchair facing the window, its back to me.
“I had a game going with the dishes,” I said, my voice flat. “You ruined my system.”
A familiar, annoyed grumble came from the chair. She stood up and walked around to face me, hands on her hips.
“I was trying to scare you! You ruined my thing.”
I tilted my head, a slow smile spreading across my face.
“Well, hello, Mother.” Then the smile dropped. “How did you get the keys this time?”
Suddenly, she became deeply fascinated by the pattern on the throw pillow, turning to examine it with exaggerated interest.
“Mother.”
She let out a world-weary sigh. “Fine. I was having a very emotional talk with Felicity. She let her guard down—she’s so soft-hearted—and I…” She paused. “Borrowed the keys.”
She looked at me.
“Happy?”
“Thrilled,” I muttered.
Then her eyes narrowed.
“You didn’t tell me about your accident. If I hadn’t stopped by Felicity’s, I wouldn’t have known at all. Were you planning to keep it from me forever?”
I turned back toward the kitchen.
“That was the plan, yes.”
She huffed. I heard her footsteps pattering after me, quick and indignant.
“And to think I was worried sick.”
I opened the fridge. The cool air washed over my face, a brief, welcome reprieve from both the kitchen and my mother, and I reached inside for a bottle of water.
Sariah Quinn was many things.
Smart. Funny. Devastatingly beautiful.
But ‘worried about me’ was never one of them.
She had barely begun university when a one-night stand with a classmate left her pregnant.
With me.
I was neither planned nor, as I eventually came to understand, particularly wanted.
But a secret that big was impossible to keep buried when your father was Aldric Quinn. The moment he learned that his daughter was pregnant—and planning not to be—he was on a plane.
He arrived with the brisk efficiency of a military campaign. He took her home, laid down the law, and made his position perfectly clear. There would be no ambiguity, no discussion, and certainly no opportunity for her to mistake his wishes for a suggestion.
The one thing Aldric Quinn loved above all else was his legacy.
His company was his life’s work, his monument. He had built it to outlive him, which meant, naturally, that it required someone to inherit it. A legacy, to a man like Aldric, was not complete without an heir.
He needed one more than he valued his daughter’s happiness.
He had loved his wife deeply and never remarried after her death, despite his desperate desire for a son.
He had never believed that a daughter could properly inherit what he had built.
There were qualities he associated with succession—authority, hardness, a certain instinct for command—which he had decided belonged more naturally to men.
But there were no other options, no convenient son waiting somewhere in the wings, and so he settled upon the only solution: he would mold Sariah into his heir through sheer force of will.
Her own dreams were beside the point. From the moment she was old enough to understand numbers, he began feeding her business lessons, teaching her markets, margins, and what he considered the language of men for whom business was not merely a livelihood but a measure of worth.
But Sariah Quinn was never one to be controlled. The tighter he squeezed, the more recklessly she rebelled.
My conception had been an accident, but it presented an opportunity to them both.
To Aldric, it was the universe, obligingly providing the solution he had been unable to devise for himself: a new heir he could shape from the beginning, before rebellion or independence or any of the inconvenient qualities that made Sariah so difficult to govern had taken root.
To Sariah, I was leverage.
She struck a hard bargain. She would carry the pregnancy to term, but only if he signed away her freedom.
No more demands that she join the company.
No more interference in her choices, her career, her life.
He would leave her alone. When he hesitated, she made her threat explicit: agree, or she would terminate the pregnancy.
He agreed, but with one non-negotiable condition of his own. To avoid scandal, and to give his future heir the legitimacy he considered essential, Sariah would marry the father. Once the baby was born, she would surrender full custody to Aldric.
She would have her freedom.
He would have his heir.
It was a remarkably tidy arrangement, the sort of solution that could only have appealed to a man who believed that everything from shareholder agreements to human lives could be reduced to terms and conditions.
But life, of course, has a wicked sense of humor.
The plane carrying my father crashed. I never got to know what kind of man he was, or whether he had ever wanted any part of the future that had been arranged for him.
Yet Aldric was undeterred.
His daughter was giving birth out of wedlock?
A minor scandal, easily contained. The father was dead?
An unfortunate detail, nothing more. Such things could be managed.
Explained. Buried beneath enough money and discretion.
None of it mattered, so long as the outcome remained the same: he would get his heir.
Then, the universe delivered its punchline.
I was born.
A girl.
His grand plan for a dutiful grandson evaporated in the delivery room. He was left with a granddaughter, and my mother, having fulfilled her side of the bargain, walked out of the hospital and his life with her hard-won freedom.
His perfect, controlled succession plan was in ashes. I would have laughed in his face if I hadn’t been too busy screaming mine off at the time.
But Aldric Quinn was not a man who accepted defeat. He no longer had my mother to control, but he had me: a blank slate, conveniently born from the failure of his first plan. And Aldric was nothing if not meticulous. He learned from his mistakes.
He would not make the same ones with me.
He didn’t simply teach me about business; he immersed me in it.
My nursery rhymes were quarterly reports. My bedtime stories were case studies in corporate takeovers. My tutors were retired CFOs and management consultants.
Business was not something I learned so much as something I grew up inside.
He didn’t forbid a social life; he simply made the boardroom my playground, until his world was the only one I knew well enough to want.
There was no rebellion to suppress because he had given me nothing to rebel against. He didn’t raise a daughter who might someday turn against his life’s ambition; he built an heir from the ground up, perfectly calibrated, one who believed the legacy was her own dream.
When he died, I finally laughed in his face.
Because the legacy he had sacrificed my childhood, my mother’s freedom, and a young man’s life for. The empire he burned every bridge to secure for a blood heir was no longer ours.
The moment the ownership papers were signed and the company was mine, I sold it.
Not to the highest bidder. I arranged a management buyout for his brilliant, long-suffering COO, the operational genius who had built the empire alongside him, year after year, while my grandfather dismissed her as nothing more than “hired help” because her name wasn’t Quinn.
He had never believed she deserved a legacy of her own.
I handed her the keys to the kingdom he never let her enter. I gave her the legacy, the title, and the authority Aldric Quinn had spent a lifetime withholding.
And with the money from that sale, I eventually founded my own company. I had built something that was unquestionably mine. Not his legacy. Mine.
I took a sip from the bottle and studied my mother, the memory rising sharp and clear.
For the first decade of my life, I didn’t know she existed.
My grandfather never spoke of her. He told me about my father—the tragic plane crash, the young life cut short—but my mother was different.
Her absence was deliberate. Calculated. Even as a child, I understood that much.
The more desperately I ached to know her, the more he would tighten the informational leash, ensuring my dependence and curiosity were tools he could wield.
Then, in my eleventh year, she simply appeared.
She didn’t ring the bell. She didn’t ask for me. She walked through the front door as though the house belonged to her, demanded to know where her father was from a startled housekeeper, and marched straight toward his study.
I hid behind a marble pillar in the grand foyer, my heart hammering against my ribs, my eyes fixed on the oak door at the end of the hall.
She was in there for almost an hour—a lifetime to a child pressed against cold stone.
And the whole time, a wild and hungry hope bloomed inside me. When that door finally opened, I was certain she would ask for me. She would look for me. She would see me, take my hand, and lead me out of this cold, silent mausoleum of a house.
She didn’t.