Page 54 of Secret Baby Daddy

The threat lands exactly where he intends it to, and Calder goes entirely still beside me, something colder than anger settling into his posture.

Roman leaves without waiting for a response, and the heavy front door clicks shut behind him with a finality that doesn’t match the unhurried way he walked out.

The silence after has a different texture than any silence I’ve shared with Calder before, not comfortable, not charged the way the pillow-wall nights have been, but the raw, exposed quiet of a wound reopened in front of the one person he has spent twelve years making sure never saw it at all.

Calder’s hands are still curled at his sides, and when I reach out and press my palm flat against his forearm, I feel him flinch before he lets himself lean, almost imperceptibly, into the contact.

“He’s not wrong that I made the call,” he says finally, quiet, raw in a way I’ve never heard from him.

“You made an informed choice based on the story he fed you. That’s not the same as making a free choice, Calder.”

I keep my hand where it is.

“I know something about men who manufacture the truth to get what they want. You weren’t tricked because you were weak. You were tricked because you trusted the wrong person, and he built an entire career out of knowing exactly how to exploit that.”

He looks down at me, something unguarded and grateful and still furious moving across his face all at once, and for the first time since Cordelia trapped us in this case together, I understand that protecting Dominic Calder has stopped being a professional obligation and started being something I would have done anyway, with no case, no client, no strategy attached to it at all.

I hold his forearm a moment longer than the gesture requires, feeling the tension in it slowly begin to loosen, and understand that whatever I am doing right now has stopped being anything I could explain to Cordelia, or to my own agency, or even fully to myself.

16

DOMINIC

I have run vehicle switches in cartels, in embassies, in cities where a wrong turn costs lives measured in the dozens, and none of that experience prepared me for how thoroughly a single amateur photograph from an unverified social account could unravel eleven minutes of careful planning.

The modern threat landscape doesn’t require professional adversaries anymore.

It only requires four hundred followers and bad luck.

We’re moving Sloane back into the city for a closed-door meeting with the family’s attorneys, the kind of trip I’ve planned down to the minute: decoy vehicle leaving from the front gate, real vehicle leaving eleven minutes later from the service entrance, a route confirmed clean by three separate sweeps.

It should be nothing.

Piper stops walking halfway across the gravel drive, staring at her phone with the stillness she gets right before she tells me something is about to go wrong.

“We have a problem.”

“Define problem.”

She turns the screen toward me.

A social media post, seven minutes old, a blurry photograph of a black SUV idling outside a coffee shop two blocks from the attorneys’ office: the replacement vehicle, the one I confirmed with Hayes personally less than an hour ago, the one nobody outside four people was supposed to know existed yet.

I catalog the geotag, the timestamp, the angle that means whoever took it was standing close enough to have been briefed, not merely lucky.

Coincidence has a texture.

This does not have it.

“That’s the real car,” I say slowly. “Photographed by someone standing close enough to read the plate, geotagged, posted to an account with four hundred followers who mostly post about brunch.”

Piper’s thumb is already moving, scrolling through the account’s history.

“This isn’t a coincidence, Calder. Someone leaked the route, or someone’s physically tailing the vehicle already, and either way, if we send Sloane into that car in the next eleven minutes, we’re driving her directly into whatever’s waiting.”

I don’t argue with her instinct, not anymore, not after the footage, not after watching her read a crowd better than half my security team.

I get Hayes on the radio, reroute the vehicle to a decoy loop through the north gate, and we hold Sloane in the house another twenty minutes while the team confirms a visual on a parked van two blocks from the original destination, engine running, two occupants, nothing that should be there.