Chapter 6: Welcome Home, Mrs. Crawford
Sophia turned sharply toward the man beside her, searching his face for any trace of the boy she had once known.
"Something wrong?"
Sebastian seemed to sense the shift in her and glanced sideways.
Sophia opened her mouth. Her throat was blocked — no sound came out.
Then came the soft click of the car door being pulled open from outside.
The night air rushed in, but it did nothing to clear the chaos in her mind. Those six digits felt branded onto her nerves.
"Welcome home, Madam."
The elderly butler stood at the head of two neat rows of household staff, already lined up on either side of the car.
Sophia snapped back to herself and forced down the suspicion rising inside her. She knew this was not the moment to ask questions.
She looked up at the estate before her — a place that stood for power and wealth in equal measure. She understood, with quiet clarity, that crossing its threshold meant severing herself completely from the past.
Sebastian got out from the other side and came to stand beside her.
"Clear out the sunroom next to the master bedroom and convert it into a painting studio."
The butler lowered his head, surprised. That sunroom was the master's favorite spot in the house — and now it was to become a painting studio.
"Use only the best. Spare nothing."
The butler set aside his curiosity and answered promptly. "Of course, sir. I'll see to it at once."
"Sir, the doctor has arrived."
Sebastian glanced at Sophia's knee. "Have him leave the medical kit. He can go."
He looked at Sophia's pale face, then turned and walked into the main hall. "Go upstairs and rest."
The second floor was enormous. The heavy Persian rugs swallowed every footstep into silence.
A housemaid led the way and pushed open the master bedroom door for Sophia.
The room was understated, yet everything in it quietly announced its own expense.
Along one side of the bedroom was a walk-in closet that took up nearly half the space. Sophia stepped inside. The racks were full of current-season haute couture — all in her exact size.
Something stirred faintly in her chest. The feeling of being held in someone's thoughts.
She said nothing. She pulled a silk slip set from the rack and went into the bathroom.
When she came back out, Sophia sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at her knee.
During the confrontation with Evelyn at the Brooklyn studio, she had knocked it against the splintered easel and raised a wide, deep bruise. Her nerves had been too tightly wound at the time — dealing with Evan's harassment — to register the pain. Now, with her body finally beginning to unwind, a dull ache crept in slowly from the edges.
Three knocks at the door.
Before she could answer, Sebastian walked in, carrying the medical kit. He had clearly just showered in the adjoining guest room, and he'd changed into a dark silk robe, the lapels hanging loose at the collar. Water tracked down the hard line of his jaw and disappeared into the muscle of his chest, and the whole effect carried a raw, unguarded tension.
Sophia gripped the duvet beneath her and looked away, unsure where to put her eyes.
Sebastian crossed the room without hesitation and dropped onto one knee in front of her, directly on the Persian rug. He didn't pause, didn't perform it — he simply knelt.
The contrast was stark. This man — the one who commanded New York's financial world and made powerful people nervous — was kneeling at the feet of a fallen heiress, his posture entirely without pride.
Sophia flushed and instinctively pulled her leg back, wanting to escape the discomfort of that imbalance. She was used to being overlooked and dismissed in the Windsor house. This kind of deliberate, careful attention left her at a loss.
A large, roughened hand reached out and closed around her calf, drawing her leg back with quiet authority. The slight calluses on his palm grazed her skin, and the warmth of his hand reached straight to her nerve endings, raising a faint tremor. The heat still rising from his skin after his shower pressed into her lungs and wrapped around her senses.
His body warmth came through the thin silk of her slip.
Sebastian opened the kit with his uninjured hand, took out a cotton swab, dampened it with antiseptic, and began applying it to the outer edge of the bruise. His touch was careful — the pressure precisely controlled, as though he were afraid of hurting her.
Sophia's breathing lost its rhythm. Her chest rose and fell too quickly. She kept her eyes lowered, her peripheral vision fixed on the hand holding the swab — because just a few inches further, past the edge of his cuff, was the old burn scar.
If he really was the person from the fire ten years ago — then was any of this a coincidence? The way they'd kept crossing paths. The rushed marriage. Any of it.
Sebastian glanced up and caught the movement of her chest. Whatever was in his eyes stayed below the surface — something dark and contained, pressed down under deliberate restraint.
Sophia looked away. And then looked back anyway, her gaze settling on his profile without her permission. The straight line of his nose, the tight set of his mouth — every feature spoke to someone who held authority as a default. Only right now, there was something else in it. A kind of patience.
Sebastian finished, dropped the swab into the wastebasket, and didn't stand. Instead he leaned forward, both arms braced against the mattress on either side of her, trapping her between his arms and the bed.
The force of him — that dense, pressing warmth — surrounded her completely. She could almost hear his heartbeat. Low. Steady.
"Eight o'clock tomorrow morning."
His voice came out low and rough in the quiet of the room.
"There's someone you need to meet. He has a key lead on your mother's medical records."
Sophia's heart missed a beat.
The medical records.
Sebastian straightened, pulling distance back between them. The pad of his thumb grazed her bare shoulder as he went, and he hooked the fallen strap of her slip back into place.
"Get some sleep, Mrs. Crawford."
He picked up the medical kit, turned, and left, pulling the door shut behind him.
Sophia sat on the edge of the bed, in the middle of everything he'd left in the air, and waited for her heartbeat to settle.
Ten minutes later, she got up, walked to the door, and locked it.
That afternoon in the studio, when Evelyn had set the flame to it, the edges of the will had already burned away. But Sebastian had moved in time, and the core of the document was still intact — the notary seal clearly visible.
Sophia went to the desk and pulled a small UV flashlight from her art satchel, the one she used to check the fluorescent reactions of her pigments. She drew the curtains, turned off the main light, and switched on the UV beam.
She worked slowly, scanning every corner of the charred fragment, missing nothing.
When the light passed over the lower left section of the back — the area the fire had eaten most — a row of numbers appeared, written in invisible ink.
7 — 3 — 1 — 0 — 2 — 5.
Sophia stared at them. She recognized the format. It was the access code structure for a high-security private vault at a Swiss bank. Her mother, in her final days, had left something behind — locked away and waiting. Whatever was inside could be enough to change everything. Perhaps the core documents relating to the Delgado Group's shareholding.
She raised her phone to photograph the sequence. And then something deep in her mind pulled taut.
This afternoon. Sebastian's phone lying face-up on the center console.
The screen lighting up with an incoming call. The passcode entered before the display timed out.
7-3-1-0-2-5.
Why would her mother's Swiss vault code be Sebastian's phone passcode?
