2026-01-05 17:04:46Maya stood near the bar, a drink in her hand, her eyes fixed on the elevator. When Kai stepped out, her face flickered with surprise, then unmistakable displeasure. She’d been waiting to hear he’d been turned away. Instead, here he was, walking in like he belonged.
What the hell? Maya’s grip tightened on her glass. Those useless security guards couldn’t stop one person? They just let this loser waltz in here like he owns the place? Her jaw clenched. Fine. If they couldn’t handle him, she would.
She recovered quickly, her smile sharp as a blade.
“Everyone!” Her voice cut through the noise. Conversations stopped, heads turned. “I want you all to meet someone very special.” She gestured at Kai with exaggerated warmth. “This is Kai Walker—Lila’s new husband. It’s his first time at Apex, so please make him feel welcome.”
“Huh?! Did I hear that right—Lila’s… husband?!”
“Poor Lila. She was this close to marrying Daniel and jumping classes, and now… what the hell?”
“Does that guy have some dirty leverage on her or something?”
For a moment, all eyes were on Lila—filled with sympathy, pity, and ridicule, as if she had suddenly fallen from her place in society.
It was so suffocating she could barely stand it.
“Let’s go. Now.” She grabbed Kai’s arm.
Before they could move, Daniel Cross stepped into their path.
Daniel Cross—the sole heir of the Cross family. Seventy percent of the region’s tax revenue flows from his family’s empire, Cross Steel. This steel giant has dominated the local economy since his grandfather’s era, a true king among men. With a background like this, almost nothing is out of Daniel’s reach—if he wants it, he gets it.
But now, he was like an eggplant struck by frost—wilted and drained of all fire.
“Is it true?” His voice shook. “Is this guy really your husband?”
Lila’s face flushed with embarrassment. Daniel’s shouting was drawing every eye in the room. She stepped forward, voice sharp. “Daniel, don’t push this any further. Move aside.”
“You can’t be serious.” Daniel’s hands clenched into fists.
In his mind, this was impossible—Lila was supposed to be his, the perfect match to seal his family’s rise. He’d spent months courting her, showering her with gifts, making sure everyone knew she was off-limits. This nobody couldn’t just steal her.
“Did they force you? Did your family pressure you into this?” His voice rose, desperate. “If you can’t fight back, I will. I’ll talk to them. I’ll help you get out of this marriage. You don’t have to—”
Kai’s eyes narrowed as Daniel’s hand shot toward Lila’s arm. Another man touching his wife—forced or not. The doorman’s sneer, the crowd’s whispers, the endless underestimation since the door... it all clicked into place.
But Daniel grabbing at Lila—his wife, whether either of them wanted it or not, was a line.
“Let go,” Kai said quietly.
Daniel ignored him completely, his fingers closing around Lila’s other arm. “Just tell me the truth. Did they make you—”
The dismissal irritated him more than the words themselves. Like Kai wasn’t even worth acknowledging. Like he didn’t exist.
“I said let go.” Kai’s voice dropped lower, colder. The anger he’d been suppressing since the entrance finally started to surface.
“You have no right to speak here! You tricked her family into—”
That was it. Kai’s control snapped.
He grabbed Daniel by the collar and slammed him into the wall.
The impact rattled the picture frames. Daniel’s breath left his lungs in a wheeze. His face went red, then purple. Kai held him there, his expression carved from ice, the anger finally released but controlled—cold and precise.
“I said,” Kai repeated slowly, each word deliberate, “let go.”
He released him. Daniel collapsed against the wall, sliding down, coughing and gasping for air.
Daniel pushed himself off the wall, his face flushed dark red. He jabbed a finger at Kai, voice dripping with contempt. ‘You think that proves anything? Any thug can throw a sucker punch.’ He turned to address the crowd, playing to his audience. ‘This is the man Lila married? A nobody who can’t win with words so he resorts to violence? How pathetic. How did you do it, Walker? What lies did you feed her grandfather? What strings did you pull to trap her into this joke of a marriage?”
“What’s it got to do with you?” His voice was calm, dangerous. “She’s already married to me. What are you trying to do—steal another man’s wife?”
The crowd erupted.
“Fuck off, who the hell does he think he is?”
“Get back here! Who the fuck are you pretending to be?!”
“Don’t fucking run! If you’ve got the guts, fight me straight up. You think you’re some badass just running off after talking tough?!”
Kai raised a brow, his gaze sweeping over the hostile faces with open contempt. He snorted softly.
“You’re not even worth fighting.”The crowd completely snapped—faces flushed, necks bulging as they shouted for Kai to stop, yet not a single one dared to actually make a move.
Until Maya stepped forward, her face flushed with anger she’d been holding back all night. “Then fight me.”
The crowd fell quiet—then whispers surged back in like a rising tide.
“What did she just say? Did I hear that right—Maya’s going to fight him?”
“He deserves it. No money, no backing, and still acting all high and mighty. Someone needs to teach him a lesson.”
“Exactly! Maya’s top three in the national fighting tournament. If she doesn’t beat the crap out of this guy today, it won’t be enough to vent our anger.”
“Go, Maya! Show him no mercy—we’re all behind you!”
A bad feeling crept up Kai’s spine as the situation grew trickier by the second. He sighed helplessly.
“Okay—but I don’t hit women.”Before the words could fade, a fierce palm strike cut through the air, carrying a faint, intoxicating trace of her scent. Kai’s eyes flickered. He moved in a flash, meeting force with softness, his broad hand closing around Maya’s punch.
Her fingers were shockingly cold. “A real cold-blooded one,” he muttered.
He released her at once, retreating to safety, brushing past her flowing hair as it whipped through the air.
“Save your breath,” Maya snapped, lunging at him again. “Take it like a man.”
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Chapter 278
Marcus was nine now, tall enough to reach the low branch of the tree outside the kitchen window without being lifted, something Kai still hadn’t quite adjusted to, the sight of his son reaching for a branch that used to require a boost. They were raking the same leaves that fell every year from the same tree, a job neither of them particularly loved and both of them did anyway, every October, without much discussion about whether it needed doing.Lila had gone inside twenty minutes earlier to start dinner, leaving them to it the way she usually did, and the yard had settled into the particular quiet of two people working side by side without needing to fill every minute with talk. Kai liked that about raking with him now. Marcus had stopped needing constant conversation to feel comfortable in the silence, had grown into the kind of quiet that didn’t need managing.“Dad,” Marcus said, not looking up from his own pile, rake dragging steady across the grass. “What was the proposal.”“Wha
Chapter 277
Constance had told him, on the bench outside the hospital, that there would be something coming to him eventually, not soon, not on any schedule she’d name, and that he should let it come in its own time instead of asking her about it again. He’d agreed to that, mostly because arguing with her about timing had never once worked in his favor. He hadn’t meant to count the weeks. For the first month he genuinely didn’t, busy enough with Priya’s rollout and the last of the season’s harvest that the promise sat quietly in the back of his mind without demanding attention.By week seven he’d started counting without quite admitting to himself that he was doing it.The package arrived on a Tuesday, plain padded envelope, no return address, his name in handwriting he recognized instantly even though he’d only seen it a handful of times, on margin notes in old documents, on the single page she’d signed for him once before. Eleven weeks exactly, though he only did the math after he’d already ope
Chapter 276
Constance announced her retirement in an email three sentences long, sent to a distribution list of exactly four people, no subject line flourish, no preamble, just the fact of it stated as plainly as she stated everything else that mattered.Kai read it twice at his desk before he fully absorbed what it actually said, and immediately began, in his head, planning something larger, a proper send off, the board room, catered food, a chance for the whole Institute to say what her thirty years had actually meant to the place. He called her within the hour to start arranging it.She cut him off before he’d gotten more than two sentences into the idea.“No.”“You haven’t even heard what I’m proposing.”“I don’t need to hear it. I already know the shape of it, and the answer is no.” Her voice carried none of the frailty of the hospital months earlier, sharp and entirely certain, the version of her he’d first met eighteen months ago. “I want a Tuesday afternoon in Archives. Coffee. Nothing el
Chapter 275
A year and a half in, Dahl still ran his corner of the Materials Lab exactly the way he’d run it from the beginning, technically compliant, spiritually untouched. Kai stopped by that October mostly out of habit, not expecting anything to have shifted, and found what he always found, review documentation filled out completely, correctly, on time, with all the warmth of a man filing paperwork he considered beneath him.“Everything’s in order,” Dahl said, not looking up from his bench.“I can see that.”“Then I assume you’re not here to lecture me.”“I’m not here to lecture you,” Kai said. “I stopped doing that about a year ago. I noticed it wasn’t working.”Dahl glanced up at that, something almost like amusement crossing his face before it disappeared again. “Took you long enough.”“You do the review. You do it correctly. You’ve never once missed a deadline or fudged a number.”“So what’s the complaint.”“There isn’t one,” Kai said, and meant it more than he expected to when he said it
Chapter 274
The flight out was quiet, Priya running through note cards she’d clearly written and rewritten a dozen times, Kai reading in the seat beside her and doing his best not to look like he was watching her do it.“You don’t have to sit in the back,” she said, somewhere over Ohio, not looking up from the cards. “You could sit up front. It would probably look more supportive.”“I’m not here to look supportive,” Kai said. “I’m here to be the person you can’t quite forget is in the room and also can’t lean on. Those are different jobs. The back does both better than the front.”“That’s a strange kind of support.”“It’s the only kind that’s actually useful today.”The room, when they got there, was smaller than the consortium’s glass conference room, a department library at one of the five institutions, maybe twenty people arranged around a long table with the slightly skeptical posture of people who’d been told about a framework and hadn’t yet decided whether to believe in it. Kai took a seat
Chapter 273
Lila had the folding tables set up before Kai had even finished his coffee, dragging them out from the garage while the morning was still cool enough to make the work easy.“You could’ve waited for me,” Kai said, coming out to grab the other end of the second table.“You were slow,” she said. “The tomatoes weren’t going to wait for you either.”Marcus was already at the end of the driveway when they got the tables positioned, arranging baskets in rows with the same seriousness he brought to everything in the garden these days. He’d grown a full head since the frost, since the row he’d insisted on choosing himself the winter before, and something about the way he stood now, steady, sure of his own hands, made Kai stop for a second just to watch him work.“What’s the sign say,” Kai asked, though he could already read it from where he stood.“FREE, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED,” Marcus said, holding it up like he expected an argument.“Lila mentioned you two had a discussion about a donation jar.”
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