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“Still lying.”

“There can be nothing between us.”

Alester turns away from me and returns to his desk, his movements controlled, almost leisurely. “When I announced Maggie, I watched the room. I watched my aunt pretend not to calculate inheritance consequences. I watched two board members exchange the exact look men give each other when they realize a clause has become inconvenient. I watched Petra prepare to manage the fallout before the fallout had even started.”

He looks back at me. “And I watched you watching Maggie.”

I don’t answer.

“You were furious,” he says. “Not surprised. Not professionally concerned. Furious. As if I had taken something personal from you.”

“You exposed her.”

“Yes. We have covered that.”

“You put her in danger.”

“I made her visible.”

“That’s not the same as safe.”

“No,” he says. “But invisibility would have been worse.”

Petra’s face tightens, but she doesn’t interrupt.

Alester lowers his voice. “There are people in my family who would prefer this child never exist. There are people who would prefer Maggie disappear quietly before any legal recognition becomes impossible to reverse. The announcement was not vanity, no matter what you think of me. It was a shield.”

“A shield that made her a target.”

“All shields do. The question is which danger is easier to control.”

“And you decided that without telling her?”

His expression cools. “She signed a contract.”

“She is a person.”

“She’s carrying my heir.”

“She’s carrying a child.”

“With my blood.”

The possessiveness in his voice turns my stomach. I take a breath, forcing my anger down because anger is exactly what he wants from me. Anger proves attachment. Attachment gives him leverage.

But perhaps he already has enough.

Alester sits again, then reaches for a dark leather folder on the corner of the desk.

My body recognizes danger before my mind identifies it. There are fears a man can bury under work, discipline, and years of clean records. But they never die. They wait.

He opens the folder. Inside are photocopied hospital records. Incident summaries. Medication charts. A death certificate.

My father’s name.

The study loses sound around me.

For one second, I’m no longer in Alester Chandler’s house. I’m standing beneath fluorescent lights in a hospital corridor that smells of antiseptic, stale coffee, and grief. My mother is crying into a tissue that has already torn apart in her hands. Someone is speaking to me, but I can’t hear them because all I can think is that my father’s hand was warm an hour ago.