Free Web NovelChapter 264: I was hoping you’d say that
He waited until the sound of the car had fully faded down the long driveway. Until the night had settled back into its ordinary sounds. Until he was completely certain there was no one left to hear him breathe.
Then he straightened up slowly from the shadow of the hedge. He stood in the dark of the driveway and looked at nothing for a long moment.
His daughter was with him.
Kalian had her or knew exactly where she was. I have other plans for that baby. Said the way you say something about a file, a document, a transaction. Not a child. A tool.
His blood was moving at a different temperature from the rest of him. He was aware of it, the heat underneath the stillness, the particular controlled fury of a man who knew exactly what he wanted to do and exactly why he couldn’t do it yet.
He wanted to reach through the dark and find his uncle and make very clear, in terms that did not require words, what it meant to take a child from its mother as a distraction.
He stood still instead. Breathed. Let the quiet do its work.
Because the moment Kalain knew his plan was failing, the moment any alarm went off in that careful, patient, calculating mind, he would move. He would move the baby somewhere darker, somewhere with fewer threads leading back to him, and Julian would be starting over from nothing. He had come too far, and Amara had paid too much for him to let that happen over the satisfaction of one moment.
Then he took out his phone.
His investigator picked up before the second ring.
"I need everything you can find on my uncle again," Julian said. His voice was completely level. "Every property he owns or has access to. Every facility, every safe house, every building he has touched, funded or visited in the last six weeks." He paused.
"Anything connected to hospitals. Anything connected to infants. Medical staff on his payroll. Private nursing arrangements. Everything." Another pause. "I need it tonight."
"Understood," the voice on the other end said. No questions.
Julian ended the call.
He stood for a moment longer in the cool night air, then he made the second call.
His mother answered on the third ring. He could hear the quiet of wherever she was, her office probably, still at the company at this hour, because that was who she was.
"Julian," she said.
"Mother." He kept his voice even. Easy. The voice of a man reporting good news because in one specific sense, he was. "I’m coming to the company tomorrow morning."
A brief silence.
"To handle the meeting?" she asked carefully.
"To take over," Julian said. Simple as that. "I want you to prepare. Quietly, tonight, whoever needs to know should know before I walk through those doors tomorrow." He looked up at the sky briefly.
"When I come in, I want it done properly. No scrambling, no improvising. If Uncle Kalian and Aunt Claire want to watch something, let them watch it be done correctly."
Another silence. Longer this time.
And then his mother said something she seldom said, not because she didn’t feel it, but because she came from a generation that showed love in the doing of things rather than the saying of them.
"It’s about time," she said softly. Julian almost smiled.
"Get some sleep, Mother," he said. "You’ll want to be rested for tomorrow."
"I’ve been rested and ready for this for years," she said. "Goodnight, my son."
The line went quiet. Julian put the phone back in his pocket. Julian came back home to find the house quiet and the bedroom light still on.
Amara was sitting up in bed. She hadn’t eaten much more of the soup, he could see the tray, but she was upright, which was something.
Her eyes found him the moment the door opened, and the anxiety that had been sitting in them all evening shifted immediately into something else. Something that needed answers. freeweɓnovel.cøm
"You left suddenly," she said. "What happened?"
Julian closed the door behind him and came to sit beside her on the bed. Not the careful, managed version of himself he had been performing all evening for Seb’s benefit, just him. He looked at her directly.
"I followed Sebastian when he left here," he said. "He met someone."
Amara went still.
"Kalian," she said.
"Kalian." He nodded once. "I heard everything."
He told her. Not a softened version, not a managed one. All of it Seb asking about Justina, Kalian’s careful non-answers, the admission about Yvette being lured to Verenza deliberately, the three babies used as noise to keep Julian from finding the signal underneath. And the line that had settled into Julian’s chest like a stone.
I have other plans for that baby.
Amara sat very still through all of it. Her hands were flat on the covers in her lap and her face was composed in the way it got when she was taking in something too large for an immediate reaction. Processing. Filing. Building.
When he finished, she was quiet for a moment. "He doesn’t know you heard him," she said.
"No."
"And Seb doesn’t know what we know."
"No."
She looked at the window. Something was moving behind her eyes, the particular quality of focus that Julian had watched across boardrooms and dinner tables and quiet mornings, the look that meant Amara Piers Vale was no longer simply thinking. She was planning.
"Then we don’t give them anything to read," she said. She turned back to him. "We appear exactly as they expect us to appear. Distracted. Separate. Struggling." Her chin lifted slightly. "While we finish this."
"That’s exactly what I was thinking," Julian said.
"Tomorrow," she said. "I take over Creed Tech. I walk in there, and I move Seb out so completely and so finally that he has nothing left to come back to." She paused. "And you..."
"Take the Vale empire," Julian said. "The coronation is tomorrow morning." Amara looked at him.
"I want to be there," she said. "After I finish with Seb, I’ll come to you."
"I was hoping you’d say that."
