Page 72 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Look at this. There’s a server room that isn’t on any current floor plan. Sealed off, buried in a subbasement access point that predates the whole security overhaul.”

I cross the room and look where she’s pointing.

She’s right, a small, unmarked room off the old wine cellar, wired into the original property’s phone lines decades ago and apparently never decommissioned when the rest of the system was modernized.

“That could be nothing. An old telecom closet.”

“Or it could be exactly the kind of forgotten access point a man with twelve years of quiet archive privileges would know about and nobody else would.”

Her eyes are bright with the focus I’ve come to recognize as her fastest route to being right about something dangerous.

“Roman’s had access to this family for over a decade, Calder. If he needed a way to monitor this property without anyone noticing, an unlisted server room from before the last security overhaul is exactly where I’d hide it.”

We find it within the hour, behind a false panel Hayes has to physically pry open, dust thick enough that it’s clearly gone untouched by anyone on the current staff—except for a single server unit, humming quietly, cables running to a router that has no business being active on a system nobody logs into anymore.

The data takes another hour to extract.

Wire transfers.

Communications logs.

A direct line from Roman Vasseur to Northbridge Capital, dated back further than the current extortion attempt, further even than Jonah’s death, proof, undeniable and complete, that Roman has been feeding information out of this family for longer than either of us had dared to theorize.

“We have him,” Piper says, breathless, staring at the screen. “Calder, we actually have him.”

The euphoria is real and immediate, and for one unguarded second I let myself feel nothing but the plain relief of a threat finally within reach of being neutralized.

Before I’ve fully processed the shift in her expression, she’s crossed the space between us and kissed me, fierce and triumphant, her hands fisting in my shirt like she’s afraid the moment will slip away if she doesn’t hold onto something solid.

I kiss her back before I can stop myself.

Then I do stop, gently, pulling back enough to look at her properly, because the rehearsed sentence from this morning is still sitting in my chest, and I owe her the truth before this goes any further.

“Piper. Wait.”

I hold her face in both hands.

“There’s something about me you need to know before this goes any further. Something I should have told you days ago.”

Something shifts in her expression, softening, and I watch her build the wrong conclusion in real time, watch her arrive somewhere gentler and more forgiving than the truth deserves.

“Is this about Jonah?” she asks quietly. “About what happened twelve years ago?”

“Not exactly. It’s—”

“Because if it is, I already know enough. I know Roman manipulated you. I know you’ve spent twelve years punishing yourself for trusting the wrong man’s judgment.”

She covers my hand with hers, steady, certain.

“I don’t need the idealized version of you, Calder. I don’t need Atlas, or whatever careful edited version of yourself you think I’m expecting. I want the man standing in front of me. Concrete and insufferable and exhausting and real.”

The name lands in the room like a struck match, and she doesn’t even notice she’s said it; doesn’t have any way of understanding that she’s just described the exact confession I was trying to make, using the exact name I was about to hand her myself.

I could stop this.

I could tell her, right now, in plain language, that Atlas isn’t a hypothetical, that Atlas is holding her face in both hands, one sentence away from a truth that would change everything about what she thinks she just chose.

I don’t.