Chapter 10
She glanced at Emily.
Then back at him.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Am I supposed to call you Uncle Adrian forever?”
He smiled.
“What would you rather call me?”
Lily became suddenly serious.
“Dad?”
Adrian went completely still.
Emily covered her mouth.
Lily’s confidence disappeared.
“Is that okay?”
Adrian dropped to one knee.
He opened his arms.
Lily ran into them.
He held her tightly.
For a long moment, the man who had once believed power meant making people fear losing him could not speak because one little girl had just shown him what it meant to be afraid of losing someone else.
Finally he kissed her hair.
“That’s more than okay.”
Lily leaned back.
“So you’re my dad now?”
“If you want me.”
“I do.”
She hugged him again.
Emily knelt beside them.
The three of them stayed that way beneath the warm afternoon sun while Rose cried openly and Marcus suddenly became fascinated by a tree.
Later that evening, after the guests had gone, Adrian entered his study.
The room was quiet.
But it was no longer empty.
A purple cup stood beside his coffee machine.
Crayons filled one drawer.
Lily’s drawings covered the wall.
On the desk sat the very first picture she had ever given him—a tall man in black beside a little girl beneath a yellow sun.
Adrian picked it up.
Emily appeared in the doorway.
“You kept that?”
“Apparently.”
“You locked it in your desk the first day.”
He looked at her.
“How did you know?”
“Rose told me.”
“Rose talks too much.”
Emily walked closer.
“She said you almost threw it away.”
“I made a better decision.”
Emily slipped her hand into his.
Outside, Lily was running down the hallway calling for her missing rabbit.
Adrian listened.
Once, he had demanded silence in these corridors because silence made a house easier to control.
Now there was laughter.
Music.
A child shouting.
A woman he loved beside him.
A rabbit missing somewhere upstairs.
And more disorder than Adrian Mercer had tolerated in his entire life.
He would not have traded it for anything.
Because the most important secret ever hidden inside his empire had not been a bank account, a weapon, a route or a name.
It had been a tiny USB drive inside an old stuffed rabbit.
And the person brave enough to hide it had been a terrified mother who believed her daughter’s small arms might protect the truth when powerful men could not.
That truth exposed a traitor.
It saved Emily.
It saved Adrian from an ambush.
But in the end, the recording had uncovered something else as well.
A frightened three-year-old had looked at the most feared man she knew and believed, with the impossible faith only a child could possess, that if she told him who had taken her mother, he would bring her home.
Adrian had spent his whole life becoming the kind of man nobody dared disappoint.
Lily Hart made him want to become the kind of man who would never disappoint her.
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And that turned out to be the greater power.
THE END
