The CEO's Little Ward

Étienne

The scar tissue in my right leg always knew when rain was coming. Tonight was no exception—a deep, persistent ache that radiated from just above my knee down through the shinbone, the kind of pain that had become as familiar as my own heartbeat over the past thirteen years. I pressed my thumb against the spot through my trousers and tried to focus on the quarterly reports spread across my desk.

The numbers blurred. Profit margins, projected growth, market share—all of it dissolved into meaningless columns as my mind drifted back to that night in Monaco, to the moment when I'd been 001 and the world had stretched before me like an infinite straightaway.

I'd been sixteen years old and already a legend. The youngest driver to ever compete in the European GT Championship. They'd called me a prodigy, a natural, a once-in-a-generation talent. But those labels had never quite captured what I'd really been—I'd been a machine, all cold calculation and zero-error execution. They'd given me the designation "001" not because I was number one, but because I was singular, unrepeatable, a statistical anomaly that shouldn't have existed.

The Monaco Grand Prix had been mine that season. Everyone knew it. I'd posted the fastest practice times, dominated every qualifying session. All I'd had to do was maintain that precision, that control, for six more races.

Then the call had come. Marc—my half-brother, seventeen years my senior, the product of my father's first marriage before he'd met my mother Isabelle—his voice cracking with panic as he told me that his seven-year-old daughter had been kidnapped in Sofia. A business deal gone wrong, some rival's idea of leverage, and the Bulgarian authorities were moving too slowly.

Elena. I'd barely known her then—Marc had adopted her with his wife Nadia when she was just a year old, after they'd discovered Nadia couldn't have children. I'd met her maybe twice, a small girl with enormous amber eyes who'd called me "Uncle Étienne" in halting French and had been fascinated by my racing trophies. She'd asked me what it felt like to go fast, and I'd told her it felt like flying.

I should have stayed in Monaco. Should have let the professionals handle it. But Marc had been incoherent with fear, and Mother—Isabelle Beaumont, the matriarch of the Beaumont family and my father's second wife—had been worse. Her composure had shattered completely as she'd begged me to do something, anything.

So I'd gotten into my car—my personal Porsche 911 GT3, the one I'd modified until it was barely street legal—and driven through the night to intercept the kidnappers on a mountain road outside Sofia. Marc's security team had tracked the vehicle, given me their route. All I'd had to do was force them to stop.

The rain had started just after midnight. I'd caught up to them on a series of switchbacks, had seen the moment their driver realized he was being pursued and decided to run. They'd accelerated, and I'd matched them, my hands moving on the wheel with the same precision I used on the track, calculating angles and speeds and the exact moment when I could force them off the road without killing anyone.

I'd done everything right. The physics had been perfect, the execution flawless. But I hadn't accounted for the black ice, hadn't anticipated their driver would panic and overcorrect so violently, hadn't predicted their vehicle would spin directly into mine at the worst possible angle.

The impact was catastrophic. Metal tearing, the world rotating around me as my car rolled once, twice. In the chaos, in the spinning darkness, I'd somehow managed to pull her from their vehicle and into mine before the final impact. I'd made a choice in that split second, twisting my body to shield her as the steering column crushed inward, as something caught my right leg and held it fast while the rest of the car crumpled around us.

The pain had been extraordinary, but I'd stayed conscious long enough to feel her small body trembling against mine, to hear her crying, her voice high and terrified: "Uncle... uncle, don't sleep..." Then the darkness took me.

When I woke up three days later, they told me my racing career was over.

Shattered femur. Destroyed knee joint. Severed tendons and ligaments. They'd saved the leg—barely—but they couldn't save what it had been capable of. Even after two years of surgeries and physical therapy, the damage was too extensive. I could walk, could even run short distances, but the sustained pressure and split-second responsiveness that racing demanded would never be possible again.

001 had died on that mountain road. In his place, they'd gotten Étienne Beaumont, heir to a luxury goods empire, a man who measured his life in quarterly earnings instead of lap times.

And Elena... Elena remembered nothing. The head trauma had wiped that entire night from her memory, leaving her with only the vaguest impression that someone had saved her. By the time she'd recovered enough to ask questions, we'd all agreed on the official story: the police had rescued her, the kidnappers had died in the crash, and her Uncle Étienne had been in Monaco the entire time, too far away to help.

Two months after that, Marc had died in a car accident while investigating the people behind the kidnapping. Officially an accident, though I'd never quite believed it. The timing had been too convenient.

Nadia—Marc's widow, a Bulgarian businesswoman who'd once been formidable in her own right—had been left alone with an eight-year-old daughter, and I'd been left with a leg that would never work properly again and the knowledge that I'd traded everything I was for a child who would never know what I'd given up.

I didn't regret it. I'd made the right choice, and I'd make it again without hesitation. But lately—

A sensation pulled me from my thoughts. I looked up from the reports and found Elena watching me from the settee across the room, her tablet balanced on her knees, her training footage paused mid-routine. Her gaze was fixed on me with an intensity that made something uncomfortable twist in my chest.

Tender, yes. But also curious, almost shy, with a hint of longing mixed with uncertainty. Those same enormous amber eyes that had looked up at me from a hospital bed thirteen years ago now held a warmth that felt too intimate, too weighted with meaning I didn't want to examine.

I held her gaze for perhaps three seconds before she realized I'd noticed, and then she looked away quickly, her attention snapping back to her tablet. Even from across the room, I could see the flush spreading across her cheeks, the way her ears had gone bright red—that telltale sign of embarrassment I'd learned to recognize over the years.

I forced myself to look back at the reports, but the numbers were meaningless now. The way she looked at me had changed, and I couldn't identify when it had started or what it meant, only that it made me profoundly uneasy. I was a twenty-nine-year-old man starting to notice things about his twenty-year-old ward that no uncle—even a nominal one—should notice.

My leg throbbed. I pressed my thumb harder against the ache and tried to focus, tried to ignore how my awareness kept drifting back to Elena's presence, tried to pretend the last two days hadn't been filled with these small, unsettling moments.

This was getting out of hand. I needed to regain control before it became something I couldn't manage.

My phone vibrated. Rémi's name—my oldest friend and the Beaumont Group's Chief Operating Officer, the one person who could read me better than I read myself—which meant business, which meant a welcome distraction. I answered without preamble.

"Tell me you're calling with good news about the personnel changes," I said, standing carefully and moving toward the window.

"Define 'good news,'" Rémi replied in that flat, analytical tone that made him both an excellent executive and an occasionally infuriating friend. "Laurent is pushing back on the timeline, and Catherine wants a preliminary meeting about the succession plan. Apparently your father's health has taken another turn."

I looked out at the garden, where the first drops of rain were beginning to fall. Behind me, Elena—now twenty years old and one of Europe's top rhythmic gymnasts, the girl I'd saved thirteen years ago who'd somehow become the center of my carefully ordered world—was reviewing her training footage, probably making notes about elements she needed to improve, pushing herself with that relentless drive that had made her one of the top rhythmic gymnasts in Europe.