Chapter 1 - The Awakening.
The silence in the east parlor was heavy enough to crush bone.
Ethan stared at the little girl on the marble floor.
Her piercing gray-green eyes mirrored his own perfectly.
The rigid architecture of his meticulously planned life collapsed in a single heartbeat.
"Is she mine?" he asked, his voice stripped of its usual corporate armor.
Rosa pulled the trembling child tighter against her chest.
She didn't need to speak.
The terrifying truth was already written in the defensive posture of her shoulders.
Victoria scoffed, adjusting the sleeve of her ruined cashmere sweater.
"Ethan, do not tell me you are falling for this maid's pathetic extortion attempt," she sneered.
Ethan did not even blink in his fiancée's direction.
He slowly rose to his feet.
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
"Get out of my house, Victoria," he said quietly.
Victoria froze, her perfectly painted lips parting in shock.
"Excuse me?" she stammered.
"You have exactly ten seconds to walk out that door before I have my security team throw you through the nearest window," Ethan replied.
His tone was not angry; it was dead, which made it infinitely more dangerous.
Victoria’s eyes narrowed into venomous slits.
"You are making a catastrophic mistake," she hissed.
"My father's private military contracts are the only thing keeping your tech empire afloat."
"If you humiliate me for this trash, we will bury you."
Ethan pulled a sleek satellite phone from his jacket pocket.
"Five seconds," he whispered.
Victoria turned on her heel and stormed out, her heels clicking like a metronome ticking down to a bomb blast.
Once the front door slammed shut, Ethan knelt back down beside Rosa.
"Are you hurt, Lily?" he asked, testing the name on his tongue for the very first time.
Lily sniffled, burying her face into her mother's neck.
"My arm hurts," the little girl murmured.
Ethan’s eyes darkened with a violent, protective rage he had never experienced before.
He looked at Rosa, taking in her exhausted, terrified expression.
"We need to leave right now," he stated.
Rosa stared at him in disbelief.
"Leave?" she echoed.
"Victoria wasn't just threatening my stock prices," Ethan explained, his eyes scanning the windows for sniper glare.
"Her father runs the deadliest private intelligence syndicate in North America."
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"By acknowledging this child, you and Lily just became targets."
Before Rosa could process the sheer insanity of his words, the glass of the east parlor’s bay window shattered into a thousand pieces.
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