Chapter 3 - The Boardroom AuditWithin forty-eight minutes, Marrow Holdings’ executive floor was locked down.
Tobias hadn’t reached out to his attorneys yet; instead, he had summoned Victoria Vance—not Elena, but his ruthless chief corporate counsel, whose loyalty to Tobias was absolute. When Victoria stepped out of the private elevator and walked into the grand office, she expected a hostile takeover defense or a federal subpoena.
Instead, she stopped dead in her tracks.
Julian was fast asleep on Tobias’s custom Italian leather sofa, wrapped in a cashmere blazer that cost more than most people's monthly rent. Leo was sitting on the massive conference table, meticulously organizing a collection of high-end fountain pens by color, while Tobias sat across from Elena in stunned, tense silence.
"Mr. Marrow," Victoria said, her professional mask slipping for a fraction of a second. "I was told there was an emergency."
"There is," Tobias said without looking up from Leo, who had just handed him a black ink pen. Tobias took it with extreme care, as if handling a live explosive. "Victoria, I want you to pull every public record, property deed, medical file, and local tax filing associated with Elena Vance over the past three years. I want to know every grocery store she shopped at, every pediatrician she visited, and who financed her life in Westchester."
Elena bolted upright from her chair. "You can't do that! That's a gross violation of privacy!"
"It's due diligence," Tobias corrected, finally raising his steel-gray eyes to meet hers. "You dropped a bomb in my office, Elena. Do you seriously think I’m going to let you walk out of here without a full audit of my own flesh and blood?"
"They aren't your flesh and blood to audit whenever it suits your corporate schedule!" Elena shouted, her voice echoing off the glass windows. Little Leo flinched at the sound, and Tobias’s expression instantly hardened into something lethal.
"Keep your voice down," Tobias warned, rising to his full height. He looked at Victoria. "Run the search. Quietly. And bring me the name of the attorney who drafted her property loophole."
"Right away, sir," Victoria said, casting a bewildered, cautious glance at Elena before retreating swiftly toward the elevators.
Once the heavy oak doors clicked shut, Elena crossed her arms, trembling with a mixture of grief and fury. "You haven't changed at all, Tobias. You still treat human lives like corporate acquisitions. You think because you have billions of dollars, because you can buy information and bulldoze legal hurdles, that you can just reclaim us like some lost asset on a balance sheet."
"If I treated you like an asset, Elena, I would have had you served with emergency custody injunctions the second you walked through that door," Tobias retorted, stepping closer until he was standing just inches from her. He could smell the faint scent of lavender and rain on her clothes—a sharp contrast to the expensive perfumes of Manhattan society. "Instead, I'm standing here trying to figure out how my wife—my wife, because those divorce papers are still unsigned—managed to hide two heirs to everything I've built for nearly three years."
"Because you would have crushed us!" Elena cried out, the dam finally breaking. "You would have smothered them with expectations, schedules, security details, and elite boarding school plans before they even took their first steps! You wanted a project, Tobias, not a family!"
"And what did you want?" Tobias shot back, his voice dropping to a harsh, dangerous whisper. "You wanted to play single mother in secret while keeping my name off their birth certificates? You thought you could just cut me out of their existence?"
Before Elena could answer, a small voice interrupted them.
"Mama?"
Julian rubbed his eyes, sitting up on the leather sofa, looking disoriented in the towering, sterile boardroom.
Tobias’s entire world shifted on its axis. The corporate war, the legal threats, the anger—it all evaporated in an instant. He knelt beside the sofa, his movements slow and deliberate, terrified of startling the boy.
"Hey, little man," Tobias said softly, his voice stripped of every trace of boardroom coldness.
Julian stared at him, tilting his head with identical curiosity. Then, reaching out a tiny hand, he touched the silver streak at Tobias’s temple.
May you like
"You look like me," Julian mumbled sleepily.
Tobias closed his eyes, a heavy, silent vow settling deep into his bones. I will never let you go.
