Chapter 6 - Whispers in the Dark
Adrian’s fingers froze against the crisp paper. His gray-blue eyes locked onto the date stamped at the top of the medical report: November 12, 2020.
It was three days after he had been involved in an explosive vehicular ambush orchestrated by a rival syndicate—an attack that had left him in a medically induced coma in a private Swiss clinic for two months.
When he had awakened six years ago, his late father, Arthur Blackwood, had sat by his bedside and delivered the news: Mara Bennett took a five-hundred-thousand-dollar payout and vanished from New York. She signed a waiver promising never to contact you again.
Adrian slowly looked up from the ultrasound photo. His gray-blue eyes met Mara's brown ones across the dim light of the penthouse.
"You brought this to the Long Island gate?" Adrian asked, his voice chillingly quiet.
Mara gripped the back of a dining chair, her knuckles turning bone-white. "I gave it to your father's personal gate commander. He brought it inside. Twenty minutes later, he came back out, handed it back to me with that red stamp, and told me that if I ever returned to Blackwood property, my family in Ohio would lose their home."
She took a shaky breath, her eyes brimming with tears she refused to let fall. "He said you were getting engaged to Brielle Cartwright. He said you knew about the pregnancy and wanted nothing to do with street trash."
The silence in the room became terrifying.
Adrian stood motionless. The dark tattoos on his neck seemed to darken as the blood rushed through his veins. The realization hit him like a physical blow: his father hadn't just separated them—he had intercepted the news of his unborn sons and weaponized it to ensure Adrian married into the Cartwright oil fortune.
"I was in Switzerland," Adrian said, every syllable dragged from the bottom of his chest. "I was in a coma for eight weeks following the November ambush."
Mara froze. "What?"
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"I never saw this envelope," Adrian said, holding the paper up. "I never gave an order to reject you. I was told you took money to leave me."
Mara’s mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out. The foundation of six years of burning hatred, six years of grueling shifts, skipped meals, and raising four boys in cramped one-bedroom apartments suddenly began to crumble beneath her feet.
