Page 93 of Secret Heir

No response.

“I’m not trying to punish you. I’m trying to keep you safe. Keep our children safe. But you have to work with me here.”

Nothing.

I’m trying so hard to keep my temper in check but her goddamn stubbornness is going to be the death of me. “Something changed. Two days ago you were here—we had breakfast as a family and everything seemed fine. Then suddenly you’re trying to escape in the middle of the night. What happened?”

The silence is maddening.

“Was it something I said? Something I did? Because if I hurt you somehow, if I scared you, I need to know so I can fix it!”

Suddenly, I hear footsteps approaching the door. My heart jumps—maybe she’s finally going to talk.

“You can’t fix this,” she says, her voice raw through the door.

“Let me try,” I tell her urgently. “You have to let me try.”

She laughs hoarsely. “You’ll just call me a liar again.”

“Then prove you’re not lying!” My frustration is mounting. “Give me something—anything—to work with! Right now all I have is you trying to run with my son after making wild accusations about one of the most trusted men in this organization!”

“They’re not wild accusations,” she says angrily. “He threatened our children, Maksim. He told me he’d make Daniel have an accident and that pregnancy is dangerous and things could go wrong with ‘the right encouragement.’ Those were his exact words.”

This is all so unbelievable. I run a hand over my face. “And you expect me to believe Alexander Morozov suddenly decided to threaten you in the garden while I was out riding? For what purpose? What possible reason would he have?”

“Because I know what he’s planning!” Aria snaps.

“What he’s—” I stop and take a breath. “What are you talking about?”

But she’s done. I hear her footsteps retreating and then nothing.

I stand there for another ten minutes, but she doesn’t come back.

That night, I can’t sleep.

I keep replaying our fights and the things she said. I can still hear the terror in her voice when she told me someone would kill her for telling me what she saw.

“Because saying it could get me killed!”

“Alexander knows! He knows I was there that night!”

“There that night.”

What night?

I sit up in bed, my mind racing. She mentioned a warehouse, didn’t she? What did she say exactly? I close my eyes and think back to the night when she tried to run off again.

“He told me he knows I was at the warehouse!”

My eyes fly open. The day she had that panic attack in the garage. That wasn’t because she saw a spider. Something in the garage triggered her. Some smell. Something that would smell like a warehouse.

And just now— “I know what he's planning.”

What if—what if she’s not lying? What if she actually saw something that made her run eight years ago?

My stomach seizes and I throw myself out of bed, heading to my office. If Aria witnessed something at a warehouse eight years ago, there should be security footage. We keep everything documented and archived.

It takes me two hours to narrow down the timeframe. Aria disappeared in early December eight years ago. I was devastated and threw myself into work, barely functional.