REJECTED, THEN THEY FOUND OUT I WAS A BILLIONAIRE

CHAPTER TEN: TWENTY-TWO YEARS OF SILENCE

They reached the stairwell. Grant pushed the door open. Then stopped. Richard almost walked into him.

"What?"

Grant slowly raised a finger to his lips. They listened. Footsteps. Coming up the stairs. Someone was climbing toward them. Slowly. Calmly. Not running. Richard's heart began pounding.

There was something almost worse about the unhurried pace of it. Every threat Richard had faced since the ballroom had come fast, a bang against a door, a gunshot, a sudden blackout. This was different. Whoever was climbing those stairs wasn't afraid of being caught, wasn't in any rush at all, and that told Richard more about how much danger they were actually in than any of the noise before it had.

He thought briefly of Lucas, of his small apartment and its nearly empty refrigerator, of a life that twenty-four hours ago had felt unremarkable in the worst way. None of it had prepared him for standing in a stairwell listening to a man's calm, deliberate footsteps and understanding, with total clarity, that the man wasn't hurrying because he had no reason to believe he could lose.

Grant pulled him backward. The footsteps stopped. Silence. Then a man's voice echoed through the stairwell.

"Mr. Grant."

Richard recognized it. The man from the elevator.

"We know you're there."

Grant's hand tightened around Richard's arm. The voice continued.

"And this time, we're not here for the boy."

Richard's eyes widened.

"We're here for you."

Something in Richard's chest loosened, just slightly, at those words, before he caught himself and felt ashamed of the relief. Grant noticed it too. He glanced sideways at Richard, something unreadable crossing his face.

"Don't mistake that for safety," Grant murmured, low enough that only Richard could hear. "Kane doesn't need you dead yet. That's not the same as you being safe. The moment he decides he does need it, there won't be a warning."

Richard's stomach turned over. He hadn't considered that his safety might simply be a temporary condition, dependent entirely on someone else's timeline rather than anything he could control. He thought of the letter opener still tucked in his sleeve, the same one he'd taken without thinking the day before, and wondered if it would matter at all against whatever Kane had planned. Somehow it felt smaller now than it had in Grant's office, more like a child's idea of protection than an actual defense.

Grant's face went pale. Then the stairwell door below them opened. Richard looked down. A man stepped through. He was holding a photograph. The same photograph Richard had seen earlier. Alexander Black. Elias Grant. Victor Kane.

The man himself looked nothing like Richard had imagined. Not the polished, dangerous figure from his mind, but someone almost forgettable, mid-fifties, gray at the temples, dressed in a plain gray overcoat that could have belonged to anyone on the street. The only thing that stood out was his stillness. He moved like a man who had never once needed to hurry, because he had already accounted for every possible outcome before he ever walked into the room.

The stranger looked up at them and smiled. "Mr. Grant," he said calmly. "Twenty-two years is a long time to keep a secret."

Grant said nothing. His hand had gone rigid around Richard's arm.

"You look well," Kane continued, almost pleasantly, as though they were old colleagues meeting for lunch rather than standing on opposite ends of a stairwell with a gun somewhere between them. "Better than I expected, given how hard you've worked to stay hidden."

"Victor." Grant's voice was steady, but Richard could feel his arm trembling. "Whatever you think happened, you're wrong."

Kane's smile didn't waver. He seemed, if anything, faintly amused by the denial, the way a man might be amused by a familiar excuse he'd heard too many times to find convincing anymore.

"Am I?" Kane tilted his head slightly. "I've had twenty-two years to think about exactly what happened, Elias. I don't think I'm wrong about very much anymore."

There was no anger in his voice, no theatrical menace of the kind Richard might have expected from a man about to raise a gun. If anything, he sounded almost tired, the way a man sounds after rehearsing an argument in his head for two decades and finally getting the chance to have it out loud.

His eyes shifted briefly to Richard, taking him in with an unhurried, appraising glance, the way a man might look over a piece of furniture he was deciding whether to keep. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy some private question, because he looked back to Grant without another word to Richard at all.

It was, in its own way, more unsettling than if Kane had threatened him directly. Richard had spent the morning being chased, cornered, and warned about, and yet the one man who apparently knew exactly who and what he was hadn't found him worth a single sentence.

That silence bothered Richard more than a direct threat would have. He had expected, somewhere in the back of his mind, that meeting the man from the photograph would come with some kind of confrontation aimed at him, some acknowledgment of who he was and what he stood to inherit. Instead Kane had looked at him the way a man might glance at a door he intended to walk through later, once the matter currently in front of him was finished.

The assistant, still crouched several steps below them, made a small, involuntary sound in his throat. Nobody looked at him. Whatever was about to happen in this stairwell had narrowed down to three people, and the assistant clearly understood he wasn't one of them.

Then he raised a gun and pointed it directly at Elias Grant.

Nobody in the stairwell moved. For a moment the only sound was the low hum of the building's ventilation somewhere above them, indifferent to everything happening beneath it.