Chapter 9: I Could Get What I Wanted

Lena's POV

I followed him through the door.

The ward was quiet except for the steady rhythm of the heart monitor, its soft beeping the only sound in the room. Grandmother Isabella was still asleep, the furrow between her brows slightly eased, her breathing slow and even. I crossed to the bed and tucked the blanket more snugly around her shoulders.

Julian stood at the window, his back to me, watching the rain fall against the glass. He was tall and still, his dark overcoat absorbing the night outside, and something in the set of his shoulders made it clear that this was a man who was never not in control.

I drew a breath and reached into my coat pocket. My fingers found the folded check before I pulled it free.

Elliott thought five hundred thousand dollars could buy my silence. He was wrong. I wasn't going to let him or Cecilia walk away from this unscathed — and beyond that, Julian had done me a kindness tonight that I hadn't earned. Without him, I never would have gotten Grandmother out of Lauren's hands. He had the right to know exactly what his wife and his son were.

"Mr. Anderson." I turned toward him and broke the stillness.

He turned from the window, his gaze dropping to what I held. I walked to the small table beside the bed and set the check down on it. "Elliott gave me this tonight. Five hundred thousand dollars. To keep my mouth shut."

Julian glanced at the figure on the check, then waited without speaking.

"I won't hide it from you." I met his eyes, keeping my voice level even as my hand, hanging at my side, curled slowly into a fist. "Elliott and Cecilia are involved. Earlier today, at the OB-GYN, I heard Cecilia say she's carrying Elliott's child. They've been together for a long time."

I had expected rage. I had expected the cold fury of a man who ruled entire boardrooms — because this wasn't just infidelity, it was a betrayal layered on betrayal, a son and a wife conspiring behind the back of the most powerful man either of them knew. For someone like Julian Anderson, that kind of defiance should have been intolerable.

But his face showed nothing. He looked at me with an expression so composed it bordered on indifference, and he simply waited for me to continue.

I pressed on. "There's more. Three years ago, Elliott tricked me with a forged marriage certificate. Legally, I was never his wife. He'd been putting contraceptives in my milk every day so I'd believe I couldn't conceive — and once I believed that, the family had every reason to turn on me. He did all of it to use me as a shield, to cover up what he and Cecilia had been doing."

Saying it out loud — all of it, in one breath — loosened something in my chest that had been wound tight for longer than I could account for. Three years of deception. Three years of enduring things I should never have had to endure. I had finally torn it open and laid it bare.

I watched him, waiting for his reaction.

He didn't move. He stood with one hand resting in his coat pocket, the low light of the ward catching one side of his face, making him look remote and hard.

"I know," he said at last. His voice was quiet and unhurried.

I went completely still. For a moment my mind simply stopped.

"You — you already knew?"

"I've known for some time." He took a step toward me.

I couldn't make sense of it. If he'd known — if he had known all of this, for some time — then why had nothing happened? Why had Elliott not been stripped of everything? Why had Cecilia still been standing in that house as though she'd earned her place there? Julian Anderson was one of the most powerful men in New York. He didn't need leverage to act. He didn't need permission from anyone.

"Why?" The word came out before I could stop it. "If you knew they'd betrayed you, why didn't you do something? Why didn't you make Elliott end the marriage?"

He didn't answer immediately. He looked at me, and behind the grey-blue of his eyes something shifted — an emotion I couldn't name moving through a face trained to reveal nothing.

He took another step forward. The distance between us narrowed.

I held my breath without deciding to.

The scent that reached me was cedar and cold rain, clean and sharp, and it seemed to close around me entirely.

"Because I needed them to act first." His voice had dropped, gone slightly rough at the edges.

I didn't understand. A man with his resources didn't need anyone else to hand him an excuse.

"I don't follow," I said.

Julian lowered his gaze to mine — direct, unhurried, the kind of focus that made it impossible to look away. "Lena, my marriage was a business arrangement from the beginning. But I didn't want to be the one who broke the terms first."

He paused. His eyes moved — briefly, deliberately — from my eyes to my mouth.

"Because I have my eye on someone else."

My heart lurched.

"If I make the first move, I look like the villain," he continued, and there was something almost chilling in how calm he sounded. "But if they've already dirtied their hands — then I can take what I want and no one can say a word against it."

I stared at him.

The words hit like a crack of thunder rolling through a clear sky. He had his eye on someone else. He had engineered this entire sequence of events — patience, restraint, letting them run — not out of ignorance, but out of calculation. And now he was standing two feet away from me, telling me this, watching my face as he said it.

His gaze was not subtle. It was the direct, unguarded want of a man who had decided he was done waiting, and it pressed against me like a physical thing.

I took a step back.

My heel caught the base of the medical equipment behind me. My balance vanished in an instant, and I felt myself pitch backward with no way to stop it.

Then his arm was around my waist — swift, certain — and he pulled me sharply toward him. I hit his chest hard, my face pressing into the solid wall of him. His arm locked at my back, holding me flush against his body, and I could feel the warmth of him through the fabric, and under that, the slow, steady knock of his heartbeat.

For a moment I couldn't move or think.

"Careful," he said, low, above my head. The word resonated in his chest.

That single word broke the spell. I shoved him back and stumbled away, putting two full steps between us before my back found the cold wall. My face was burning, and I couldn't do anything about it — couldn't reason it away, couldn't pretend it wasn't happening.

He was my father's old friend. He was the head of the Anderson family. He was someone I had always regarded with a kind of respect that didn't leave room for anything else. And I had just stumbled directly into his arms in a hospital room at midnight while his wife was somewhere in this same building.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Anderson." I kept my eyes down, staring somewhere in the direction of the floor. My voice came out uneven. "I didn't mean to. Thank you."

The room was silent.

After a long moment, I heard him exhale — a quiet, almost imperceptible breath.

"Lena." My name in his mouth, without any of the weight it had carried before. Cooler now. Deliberately pulled back.