Sins of the Father
The stillness of the apartment pressed against Nadia’s skin like a second layer of cold. She hadn’t moved from the armchair since putting Finn to bed two hours ago. The clock on the cable box ticked past 1:47 AM, each second a small hammer strike against her composure. She hadn’t slept. Couldn’t. Every shadow in the room seemed to breathe.
And somewhere in the darkness, a low, gravelly voice comes from the darkness behind her. “You should have told me, Nadia. You should have told me he was mine.”
Her spine locked. The voice had changed—deeper, rougher, threaded with a vibration that she recognized from seven years ago, from moonlit nights in a cabin that smelled of pine and leather. She didn’t turn. Her fingers curled into the armrests, nails scraping the worn fabric.
“Get out of my apartment,” she said, and her voice held steady because it had to. Because if it cracked, everything would crack with it.
A soft creak of floorboards. He was moving closer.
“I can’t do that.” Rowan Thorne stepped into the faint light spilling from the kitchen, and the years between them collapsed into a single, unbearable instant. He looked the same, but sharper—jaw cut from granite, shoulders broader beneath a dark wool coat, eyes the color of autumn earth. Those eyes had once traced the curve of her spine in the dark. Now they tracked the pulse at her throat like a predator counting down.
“You don’t get to break into my home and make demands,” she said, finally standing. The armchair scraped back. She put the coffee table between them, a flimsy barrier of pressed wood and stacked magazines. “Seven years, Rowan. Seven years of nothing.”
His hands stayed at his sides, palms open. A deliberate display of restraint. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s worse.”
“I know.” He took another step, stopped when she flinched. “I know it’s worse. I know I have no right to stand here and ask for anything. But I’m not asking.”
Nadia’s laugh came out sharp and broken. “Still the Alpha, aren’t you? Still deciding what everyone else owes you.”
Rowan’s jaw did something complicated, but he didn’t argue. Instead, he reached into his coat and pulled out a slim tablet. He set it on the coffee table between them and tapped the screen. A dossier opened—photographs, financial records, surveillance stills. Nadia’s stomach dropped when she saw her own face in a grocery store parking lot, Finn’s small hand in hers.
“Owen Aldridge has this,” Rowan said. “He’s been building a file on me for eighteen months. Every weakness. Every ally. Every woman I’ve ever…” He paused, and the silence was heavy with things unsaid. “Your photo was in the section marked ‘Vectors of Leverage.’ He knows you exist. He knows about the child.”
Nadia stared at the image of her son, pixelated and cold on someone else’s screen. “The Aldridges. The family that’s been—what, trying to destroy your company?”
“They’re a human corporation using illegal surveillance and hostile takeover tactics to crush my pack’s financial holdings,” Rowan said, each word clipped and precise. “Beckett Aldridge has spent thirty years engineering a network of shell companies, private military contractors, and data brokers. He doesn’t know about werewolves. That’s not his game. He smells blood in the water and wants Thorne Holdings carved up and sold to the highest bidder.”
Nadia pressed her palms flat against the table, grounding herself. “Then why does he care about me? About Finn?”
“Because Owen thinks the child is his leverage.” Rowan’s voice dropped, and the temperature in the room seemed to fall with it. “He doesn’t know what Finn is. But he knows I came to see you seven years ago. He knows I stayed for three weeks. And Beckett Aldridge doesn’t leave loose ends.”
The air left her lungs. She looked toward the hallway where Finn’s bedroom door sat cracked open, a sliver of nightlight bleeding into the dark. Her son. Her quiet, strange, perfect son who never cried as a baby, who watched the world with ancient patience, who drew pictures of moons and forests he had never seen.
“He’s six years old,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to pretend you know anything about him.” Nadia’s hands were shaking. She pressed them to her thighs. “He was born at 3:14 in the morning on a Tuesday. I was alone. The cord was wrapped around his neck. He didn’t cry when they pulled him out. The nurse panicked, and then he opened his eyes and they were gold, Rowan. Pure gold. And he just… looked at her. Calm. Like he was waiting for her to catch up.”
Rowan’s breath stopped. She saw it—the hitch in his chest, the sudden stillness of a man who had learned to control everything except the thing that mattered most.
“He’s a Null,” Rowan said, and the word carried weight she didn’t understand.
“He’s my son.”
“He’s both.” Rowan stepped around the coffee table, slow and deliberate, giving her time to retreat. She didn’t. “A Null is rare. One in a generation. They don’t shift until puberty—standard wolf development—but even now, before the change, they’re different. His wolf is already there. Waiting. That’s why he’s calm. That’s why he’s patient. He feels the pack bond even if he doesn’t know what it means.”
Nadia’s throat tightened. “You can smell it.”
“I can smell everything.” His voice cracked on the last word, and for a moment, she saw the man she had known—not the CEO, not the Alpha, but the man who had held her in a cabin while rain hammered the roof. “I can smell him on your clothes. I can smell the cereal he ate for breakfast. I can smell that he’s afraid of the dark but refuses to admit it because he wants to be brave for you.”
A tear slipped down her cheek before she could stop it.
“I didn’t know,” Rowan said again, and this time the words broke open. “I didn’t know. If I had known, I would have burned the world to get back to you. I would have torn down every wall Beckett Aldridge built. But I didn’t know, and now Owen has your face in a dossier, and that means—”
A high-pitched buzz cut through the air.
Rowan’s head snapped toward the window. His pupils dilated, irises bleeding from brown to molten gold. He moved before Nadia could speak, crossing the room in three strides and ripping the curtain aside.
A drone hovered outside the fourth-floor window.
It was small, black, military-grade, its single optic lens gleaming with cold light. It had been there long enough to record everything. The sound of its rotors was barely audible, a whisper against the glass.
Rowan’s hand shot out. The glass shattered inward. He caught the drone mid-air, crushed it in his bare palm, and the metal screamed as it crumpled into a ruin of wires and plastic. Sparks dripped between his fingers. He didn’t flinch.
Nadia stood frozen, glass glittering at her feet. The cold night air poured through the broken window, carrying the distant hum of the city.
“They’re watching.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
Rowan turned, his fist still smoking. “They know I’m here. Which means they know I found you.”
She looked at the wreckage in his hand, at the blood welling from a cut on his palm, at the impossible gold still burning in his eyes. Everything she had built—the quiet job, the small apartment, the carefully ordinary life—was already crumbling.
“I need to get Finn.”
“No.” Rowan stepped into her path, gentle but immovable. “If you wake him now, he’ll be scared. We have time. A few hours. They won’t move until they know what I’m planning.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know Beckett Aldridge.” Rowan’s voice was iron. “He’s a corporate predator, not a soldier. He wants to own me, not kill me. Owen might be reckless, but Beckett calls the shots. And Beckett needs proof of a crime before he acts. Right now, he has a drone feed of me breaking into an apartment. That’s trespassing. He’ll use it, but he’ll wait until morning to decide how.”
Nadia pressed her hands to her face. Her skin was cold. Her thoughts were scattered. She counted the exits in the room, measured the distance to Finn’s bedroom, calculated the time it would take to pack a bag and disappear. She had done it before. She could do it again.
“You’re running the numbers,” Rowan said, and there was something soft in his voice. “You always did. I remember. You used to count the seconds between lightning and thunder to figure out how far the storm was.”
She dropped her hands. “Stop pretending you remember me.”
“I remember everything.” He held her gaze, and there was no comfort in it, only the brutal weight of truth. “I remember that you hate eggs scrambled too hard. I remember that you hum when you’re nervous. I remember that you cried the last night we were together, and I told you I’d come back, and I didn’t.”
The silence that followed was thick enough to drown in.
Nadia looked at the shattered window, at the dark city beyond, at the tiny red light blinking in the wreckage of the drone. Somewhere out there, Owen Aldridge was reviewing footage of her son’s face. Somewhere out there, a man she had never met was deciding how to use her child as a weapon.
“What do we do?” she asked.
Rowan’s expression shifted, sharpening into the mask she remembered from his world—the Alpha, the strategist, the man who had built an empire from blood and bone.
“We go into hiding. I have a safe house in the mountains. No digital footprint, no corporate registry, no connection to Thorne Holdings. We leave tonight, before dawn.”
“And after?”
“Then we fight.” Rowan opened the crumpled drone, extracting a small data chip from its core. “This is a bespoke unit. Aldridge Corp signature. I can trace it back, build a case, expose their surveillance network. But that takes time. For now, we focus on survival.”
Nadia looked toward the hallway again. She could see the edge of Finn’s door, the soft glow of his nightlight, the shadows that seemed to breathe in rhythm with her heart.
“He doesn’t know about you,” she said. “He doesn’t know about any of this. He thinks his father is dead.”
Rowan’s jaw set firmly, but he didn’t look away. “Then we’ll tell him the truth. When we’re safe.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“You’re right.” He set the data chip on the table, a small piece of evidence that felt larger than the room. “You decide. I’ll follow. But we need to move.”
Nadia closed her eyes. She thought of Finn’s laugh, his quiet drawings, the way he looked at the moon like it was a familiar friend. She thought of the dossier, the drone, the gold in a stranger’s eyes.
When she opened them, Rowan was watching her with the weight of seven years in his gaze.
“Pack the bags,” she said. “I’ll wake him.”
Rowan nodded once and moved toward the bedroom, pulling a burner phone from his coat. He called a single number and spoke two words: “Code Cascade.”
Nadia walked down the hallway, her bare feet silent on the cold floor. She pushed open Finn’s door and watched the rise and fall of his small chest beneath the dinosaur-print blanket. His eyes fluttered open, and he looked at her with that unsettling calm that had always made her heart ache.
“Mommy? Are we going somewhere?”
“Yes, baby,” she said, and her voice was steady because it had to be. “We’re going on an adventure.”
Finn smiled, small and trusting, and Nadia’s heart cracked along fault lines she had been hiding for seven years.
Behind her, in the living room, Rowan crushed the remains of the drone under his heel. As he crushes the drone, Rowan’s eyes flicker pure gold. He turns to Nadia. “The Aldridges know about Finn. We have until dawn before Beckett sends his men.”