Chapter 4 - THE UNWANTED INVITATIONTwo weeks melted into three, and the temporary arrangement began to look terrifyingly like a permanent home.
The gray, Spartan apartment had transformed. Drawings by Lily and Mia were taped to the refrigerator with magnets shaped like farm animals. A small pair of pink sneakers sat neatly beside Adam’s heavy work boots by the front door. The sound of children laughing—giggling over spilled cereal or watching cartoons on Saturday mornings—had replaced the sterile silence Adam had guarded so fiercely.
And Anna... Anna had become the anchor Adam never knew he was missing.
She cooked dinner every night, turning cheap ingredients into warm, savory meals. She listened when he talked about the factory machinery, and she didn't laugh when he meticulously organized his sock drawer on Saturday afternoons.
One evening, as Adam was clearing the dinner table, a sharp, authoritative knock echoed loudly against the apartment door.
Adam frowned. He rarely had visitors. Delivery drivers didn't come to the third floor.
He walked to the door and pulled it open.
Standing in the hallway was a tall, sharply dressed man in a tailored charcoal overcoat, his silver-rimmed glasses gleaming under the harsh hallway light. Behind him stood a burly man in a dark suit who looked like he moonlighted as a bouncer.
Adam’s eyes narrowed. "Can I help you?"
The man in the overcoat looked past Adam into the apartment, his lip curling in quiet disgust as he took in the cheap furniture, the children’s toys on the rug, and Anna standing frozen by the kitchen counter.
"Well, well, well," a smooth, condescending voice drawled. "Look at how the mighty have fallen. Sister dearest, I must admit, I expected you to be living in a motel, not playing domestic house with a blue-collar mechanic."
Anna turned deathly pale. She dropped the dish towel she was holding, her hands flying to her mouth.
"Robert..." Anna whispered, the name escaping like a curse.
Robert Miller—Anna’s estranged older brother and the heir to the Miller Industrial Group—stepped past Adam without an invitation, brushing his expensive coat against Adam’s shoulder as if entering a pigsty.
"I offered you a deal, Anna," Robert said, his voice dripping with condescension as he walked toward the living room where Lily and Mia stood watching nervously from behind the couch. "Sign over your share of the family estate trust, renounce your ridiculous marriage claims, and I’d make sure you had a comfortable allowance. Instead, you drag my family name through the mud, hiding out in a rat-trap slum with two bastards—"
Before Robert could finish the word, Adam moved with terrifying speed.
In two long strides, Adam crossed the room, grabbed Robert by the lapels of his expensive coat, and slammed him hard against the apartment wall with enough force to rattle the framed pictures on the drywall.
"Get the hell out of my apartment," Adam hissed, his voice dropping into a dark, lethal register that made the burly bodyguard step forward with alarm.
May you like
"Sir! Step away from Mr. Miller!" the bodyguard barked, reaching inside his jacket.
"Try it," Adam snarled, not breaking eye contact with Robert, whose face had gone chalk-white with fear. "Try pulling whatever weapon you've got in that jacket, and I will personally throw both of you out this third-story window into the snowbank."
