My Dangerous Ex Hunted Me Down After 5 Years — But He Didn’t Come For Revenge
Part 2
I sat rigidly against the leather seat as the city blurred outside the SUV windows.
Water streaked across the tinted glass in silver lines, distorting neon signs and headlights into soft smears of color.
Brian sat across from me rather than beside me, one arm resting casually against the door.
His gray eyes were fixed on the traffic ahead with a terrifying calm.
The interior of the vehicle smelled like cedarwood, rain, and expensive leather.
It was entirely too familiar, making my chest ache in dangerous ways.
No one spoke as our driver navigated through midnight traffic, another black SUV trailing closely behind us.
Every few minutes I caught glimpses of Brian’s reflection in the glass.
Hard jaw, tired eyes, and the faint scar near his mouth catching flashes of street light whenever we passed beneath intersections.
Five years ago, he used to smile more.
The realization hurt worse than it should have.
I folded my arms tighter around myself and stared down at my trembling hands.
“You should have let me stay at the hospital,” I whispered.
Brian finally looked at me.
“And let Greg Petrov’s men walk straight through the front doors?”
And “you don’t know they would have.”
“I do.”
The certainty in his voice unsettled me, settling heavily in the silence between us.
The SUV slowed suddenly as massive black steel gates appeared ahead through the rain.
They opened automatically, allowing the convoy to roll into a private underground entrance beneath a towering Manhattan skyscraper.
Marble walls reflected soft gold lighting across polished floors.
This was not the Brian I once knew in Brooklyn.
The man beside me now ruled a completely different, much darker world.
We rode a private elevator up in absolute silence, ascending higher until Manhattan glittered beneath us like a drowned galaxy of lights.
The penthouse doors slid open with a soft metallic chime.
It looked less like an apartment and more like the top floor of a private museum, wrapped entirely in floor-to-ceiling windows.
A woman appeared from down the hallway almost immediately.
“Brenda, this is Megan,” Brian said smoothly, removing his damp coat.
Brenda smiled softly, her brown eyes warming with undeniable recognition.
“It is nice to finally meet you, Miss Wright.”
My stomach tightened instantly at the word ‘finally’.
“The boy is awake,” Brenda added quietly.
“He has been asking for you.”
Brian nodded once, the hardened edges of his expression instantly softening into something incredibly vulnerable.
“He’s six,” Brian said softly, turning to me.
“His name is Tyler.”
Before I could process that Brian Rossi was a father, small footsteps echoed faintly from the hallway.
A little boy stood there clutching the sleeve of an oversized gray sweater.
He had dark, messy hair, pale skin, and wide green eyes that looked painfully familiar.
He froze the moment he noticed me standing there.
Brian’s entire body went still, waiting with a terrifying kind of hope.
Slowly, cautiously, Tyler stepped closer to me.
He didn’t speak, but he extended a small, trembling hand, holding out a crumpled piece of paper.
I knelt down instinctively, taking the crayon drawing from his small fingers.
My heartbeat stopped completely as I looked down at the image.
It was a drawing of a tall man, a little boy, and a woman.
Drawn carefully around the woman’s neck, etched in a faded gray crayon, was my tiny silver cross.
How could a traumatized little boy who hadn’t spoken in almost a year possibly know about the necklace I left behind five years ago?
