Secrets Beneath the Oak
The travel from Moonlit Brews Coffee House to Blackwood Industries, executive office consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The elevator doors slid open onto the fifty-third floor, and Vivian Delacroix stepped into a world she had spent seven years avoiding.
Blackwood Industries occupied the entire penthouse level of the tower that bore its name—a monument of glass and steel that cut into the Seattle skyline like a blade. The reception area was all sharp angles and muted grays, minimalist art on the walls, a single orchid blooming in a crystal vase on the assistant’s desk. The woman behind it looked up, red lips parting with practiced surprise, but Xavier walked past her without a word, his hand a firm pressure at the small of Vivian’s back.
She could have pulled away. She should have pulled away.
Instead, she let herself be guided through the glass doors, down a corridor lined with framed magazine covers—*Forbes*, *Fortune*, *Business Weekly*—each featuring the same dark-haired man who now walked beside her, jaw set, gold eyes fixed forward. The covers were from years past. She recognized the oldest one. She had clipped it from a newsstand in Portland, seven months pregnant, and kept it folded in her wallet until the paper disintegrated.
The office at the end of the corridor was larger than her entire apartment.
Floor-to-ceiling windows framed the Seattle skyline, the Space Needle a distant silver needle against the bruised afternoon sky. A massive oak desk dominated the room—hand-carved, antique, utterly incongruous with the surrounding glass and chrome. Vivian’s eyes snagged on it, recognition flickering before she could stop it.
The Blackwood family crest was carved into the side panel. An oak tree, roots spreading deep, branches reaching for the moon.
“Sit.” Xavier’s voice was flat, controlled. He moved around the desk, not sitting behind it but leaning against its edge, arms crossed. A deliberate choice. He wanted to loom, to dominate the space between them. “You can either tell me the truth, or I pull Milo’s file from the system and piece it together myself.”
Vivian’s legs gave out. She sank into the leather chair across from him, the absurdity of the moment crashing over her—she was sitting in the office of one of the most powerful men in the Pacific Northwest, a man who had been nothing more than a stranger with beautiful hands and a low laugh seven years ago, a man who was now the father of her child.
“You don’t need to pull anything,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “I’ll tell you.”
The clock on the wall ticked. A grandfather clock, old and ornate, its pendulum swinging in steady rhythm. Vivian used it to anchor herself, counting the seconds as she gathered the words she had rehearsed a thousand times but never spoken aloud.
“I didn’t know who you were that night. Not really.” She kept her eyes on the clock’s face, its Roman numerals slightly faded. “You were just a man at a bar. A good-looking man who bought me a drink and made me laugh and didn’t try to sell me anything or put me in a box. I was twenty-three. I was running from my family, from their expectations, from a life I never wanted. And you were…” She paused, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. “You were exactly what I needed. A stranger. One perfect night with no strings.”
His expression didn’t change, but something in his posture shifted. A subtle straightening, as if bracing for impact.
“Four weeks later, I was in Portland. I had a positive pregnancy test in one hand and a counterfeit ID in the other. I changed my name. I found a studio apartment in a building with peeling paint and a landlord who didn’t ask questions. I was terrified.” She finally looked at him, meeting those gold eyes. “And then Milo was born, and I stopped being terrified. I became something else. A protector.”
“You chose to keep him.” It wasn’t a question, but she answered anyway.
“Yes.”
“And you chose not to find me.”
“I didn’t know your last name. You told me your first name was Xavier, and I thought—” She let out a breath, a sound caught between a laugh and a sob. “I thought it might be fake. I thought everything about that night might be a beautiful lie I’d told myself. And then I saw the *Forbes* cover. Six months pregnant, standing in a grocery store checkout line, and there you were. Xavier Blackwood. Heir to the Blackwood industrial fortune.”
The grandfather clock ticked. Twelve seconds passed.
“You could have reached out,” he said. His voice was quiet now, stripped of its earlier edge. “You could have come to me.”
“Would you have believed me?” Vivian leaned forward, her hands gripping the armrests. “A woman you spent one night with, seven years ago, showing up at your office with a child? What would you have done, Xavier? Run a paternity test? Dragged me through court? Taken him from me?”
Something flickered in his eyes. Pain, perhaps. Or recognition.
“Because that’s what the Covingtons would have done,” she continued, her voice dropping. “And they were already circling you by then. I saw the article. ‘Blackwood Industries Under Siege—Covington Family Mounts Hostile Takeover Bid.’ I researched everything. The Covingtons aren’t just business rivals, Xavier. They’re wolves. Literally. Jasper Covington runs that family like a pack, and his son Dorian is worse. They use corporate warfare to destroy packs—poisoning water supplies near territorial lands, leveraging debt to force sell-offs of ancestral property, engineering hostile takeovers that leave families destitute.”
Xavier’s jaw didn’t tighten—she thought of the instruction she’d given herself not to describe it that way—but his hand moved to the desk, fingers splaying against the carved oak surface. “You knew about packs.”
“My family was never part of that world. But we knew it existed.” She looked down at her own hands, pale and empty. “My grandmother used to tell me stories. Warnings. ‘Don’t trust the moon-children,’ she’d say. ‘They’ll take you into their world and never let you leave.’ I thought she was insane. Then I saw your face on that magazine cover, and I realized the man I’d spent one night with was a moon-child. And if the Covingtons were coming for you, they would come for anyone connected to you. Including a child they could use as leverage.”
The clock ticked. Twenty-one seconds.
“You hid him to protect him.”
“Yes.”
“You raised him alone. In hiding. For seven years.”
“Yes.”
Xavier pushed off from the desk. He walked to the window, his back to her, hands clasped behind him. The rain had lightened to a drizzle, streaks of water running down the glass like tears. “And the letters? The emails? The legal notices I sent to every Delacroix in the country, trying to find you after I learned your real name?”
Vivian’s stomach dropped. “I never got them. I changed my name. I changed everything.”
“I hired three private investigators.”
“Then they were either incompetent or bought off by the Covingtons, because I was in Portland for six years and Seattle for one, and no one ever found me.” She stood, her legs still unsteady but her resolve hardening. “I’m not a fool, Xavier. I knew what I was doing when I disappeared. I built a life that couldn’t be traced. I paid cash for everything. I didn’t use credit cards. I didn’t open a bank account until Milo was four, and even then, it was under a false identity.”
He turned. The gold in his eyes had intensified, catching the gray light from the windows. “You could have trusted me.”
“I couldn’t afford to.” She held his gaze. “And you can be angry about that. You have every right to be. But I need you to understand—I didn’t keep Milo from you because I wanted to hurt you. I kept him from you because I was terrified that if the Covingtons found out about him, they would use him to destroy you. And then they would destroy him too.”
The silence stretched between them, dense and heavy. The clock ticked. Twenty-three more seconds.
“He has my eyes,” Xavier said finally. His voice was rough, scraped raw. “When I saw him in that café, I knew. I didn’t need a test. I knew.”
“Then you understand why I’m terrified right now.”
He crossed the room in four long strides, stopping a foot away from her. Close enough that she could smell his cologne—cedar and something sharp, like winter air. “We’re going to do the test anyway. For legal purposes. For the record.”
“Fine.”
“And until the results come back, you and Milo are staying in the penthouse upstairs. I have a private residence on the top floor. It’s secure. Bulletproof glass, biometric locks, twenty-four-hour security—”
“Xavier.”
“—Flynn will oversee the rotation. He’s my security chief, former military, completely loyal. He can escort you to pick up Milo’s things from your apartment in the morning, but I want you both in the building tonight.”
“Xavier, stop.”
He stopped. His hands were at his sides, fingers flexing, as if he was fighting the urge to reach for her.
“I need you to hear me,” she said. “I didn’t come here to move into your penthouse. I came here because you cornered me in a café in front of my seven-year-old son, and I didn’t have a choice. But I need you to understand something.” She stepped closer, close enough that she could see the faint scar above his left eyebrow, the one she’d traced with her fingertip on a night she’d tried to forget. “I will do whatever it takes to keep Milo safe. If that means staying in your penthouse, fine. If that means working with you to stop the Covingtons, fine. But the moment I think Milo is in danger because of you, I will disappear again. And this time, you won’t find me.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then something shifted in his expression—not softening, exactly, but settling. As if he’d made a decision.
“I’m not going to let that happen,” he said. “You don’t trust me yet. That’s fair. I don’t trust you either. But we have one thing in common, Vivian. We both want Milo safe. And right now, the safest place for him is with me.”
She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him that she had kept Milo safe for seven years without his help, without his name, without his fortune. But the words died in her throat as the weight of the past hour crashed down on her shoulders.
“One condition,” she said. “Selene watches Milo while we talk. She’s my friend. She’s been with us since Milo was three. She’s family.”
Xavier nodded once. “I’ll have Flynn escort her to the penthouse. Milo can have the guest room—it already has toys. I had it prepared when I started looking for you.”
She blinked. “You prepared a room for a child you’d never met?”
“I prepared a room for my son.” His voice cracked on the last word, just slightly. “I’ve been looking for you for six years, Vivian. I never stopped. I never gave up. Because I knew, somehow, that you were out there. That I had a family I didn’t know about.” He looked away, jaw working. “I just didn’t know I had a son.”
The grandfather clock chimed. Four o’clock.
“I want to see him,” Xavier said. “After the test. I want to talk to him.”
“He’s seven years old,” Vivian said. “He doesn’t know about any of this. He doesn’t know what you are, what I was running from, any of it. He just knows I told him we were going on an adventure today.”
“Then we’ll tell him the truth. Slowly. Gently.”
“And the Covingtons?”
Xavier walked back to his desk, pulling open a drawer. He withdrew a leather-bound ledger, its pages worn, the cover stamped with the same oak tree crest. He set it on the desk and opened it.
“Jasper Covington has been trying to destroy my family for thirty years. Dorian has been running his operations for the last five. They use debt as a weapon—buying up land, crippling smaller packs, forcing them into submission or extinction.” He turned the ledger so she could see. Columns of numbers, names of packs, dates of acquisitions. “I’ve been documenting their methods for three years. Building a case. And recently, I discovered something.”
Vivian leaned over the desk, reading the entries. Her blood ran cold.
“There’s a secret debt,” Xavier said. “A loan Jasper took from a consortium of European packs fifteen years ago. He used it to fund the initial takeover of Blackwood Industries’ shipping division. He never paid it back. Instead, he’s been siphoning money from his legitimate businesses to cover the interest, and the principal is about to come due.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred million dollars. In six months.”
Vivian looked up. “He’s desperate.”
“Desperate people make mistakes.” Xavier closed the ledger. “I’ve been waiting for him to slip. And now I have a reason to accelerate the timeline.” He looked at her, and there was something new in his eyes—not just recognition, but resolve. “He went after my family. He went after my son. I’m going to burn his empire to the ground.”
The door to the office opened. Flynn stepped in, his expression unreadable. “Sir, the test results are ready. The courier just delivered them.”
Xavier took the envelope. His hands were steady as he opened it, but Vivian saw the tremor in his fingers, barely perceptible.
He slid the paper across the desk.
She read the numbers. 99.99% match.
The world tilted, then righted itself. She had known. She had always known. But seeing it in black and white, official and final, made it real in a way that nothing else had.
Before Xavier could speak, his phone buzzed. He picked it up, his expression shifting from anticipation to ice-cold fury.
He turned the screen toward her.
A photo of Milo at the park. Her son, small and bright-eyed, sitting on a swing. And on his chest, perfectly centered, a red laser dot.