Gabriel POV
He moved through the crowd faster than was polite and didn't care.
Excuse me. Pardon. He cut between a stroller and a drinks table and nearly walked into a doctor carrying a clipboard and kept going. His eyes stayed on the dark hair near the exit. On the small boy walking fast beside her with his hand locked in hers. On the child on her hip who had turned to look back over her shoulder at the room with wide grey eyes.
Grey eyes.
His blood went cold and then hot and then he wasn't thinking anymore, just moving.
But the crowd was thick near the exit and a group of parents with strollers had bottlenecked the doorway and by the time he pushed through to the other side the car park stretched out in front of him wide and busy and empty of anyone he recognized.
Gone.
He stood at the entrance and looked left, then right, then across the rows of parked cars and saw nothing. Just ordinary people going about an ordinary morning. No dark hair. No small boy. No child with his eyes looking back at him over a woman's shoulder.
He pressed his hand flat against the door frame and breathed.
His PR manager appeared at his elbow. "Mr. Stone? We should get the last few photos before—"
"Not now."
"But the event organizer is—"
"I said not now." He turned back inside.
The doctor at station three was still standing where he had left her, tablet in hand, looking like she was trying to decide whether to come after him or wait. When she saw his face she stayed very still.
Gabriel walked back to her.
"The mother," he said. "Iris Mercer. Is she still registered on site?"
The doctor checked her tablet. "She completed registration approximately forty minutes ago. Both children were seen and cleared. Their file shows departure logged at—" she looked at the time stamp, "eleven forty-two."
Four minutes ago.
She had been four minutes ahead of him.
"Is there a contact number on the registration form?"
The doctor hesitated. "Mr. Stone, I can't give out personal information without—"
"I understand." He stepped back. "I'm sorry. You've done nothing wrong."
He turned away from the station and stood in the middle of the hall and let the noise of the event move around him while he processed what he knew.
Two children. His. Born three years ago. Iris had been pregnant when she left the penthouse. She had known, or discovered it shortly after, and she had taken it and built a life around it in complete silence. She had raised his children without once picking up a phone.
He thought about the three words on the note he left her. The five million dollars that arrived before she woke. He thought about the text she sent back. Two words. Goodbye, Gabriel.
He thought about walking out of that bedroom.
He closed his eyes for three seconds.
Then he opened them and called Evander.
Evander Cole was his COO and the closest thing Gabriel had to a person he trusted completely. He picked up on the second ring.
"I need an address," Gabriel said. "Iris Mercer. She may be using a different professional name, possibly Iris Lane. She's in this city. I need everything you can find in the next thirty minutes."
A pause. "Gabriel, what's happening?"
"I'll explain when I have the address."
Evander asked nothing else. This was one of the reasons Gabriel trusted him.
He sat in the back of his car in the car park and waited with his phone in his hand and his jaw set and his mind doing something it had not done in three years. It was running toward something instead of away.
His phone exploded before Evander called back.
First one notification. Then five. Then his screen was moving too fast to read individual alerts. His PA was calling. His mother was calling. Henry was calling. He ignored all of them and opened the news app.
The headline was already everywhere.
Billionaire CEO Gabriel Stone linked to secret twins at charity DNA event. Mother believed to be mystery ex-wife Iris Mercer.
Someone at the event had a phone and a media contact and the story had moved at the speed that stories only moved when they involved money and children and a man whose face was already known.
There was a photo someone had taken inside the hall. Blurry, taken on a phone from across the room. It showed Gabriel at station three with the doctor, his face angled toward the tablet she was holding. It showed enough.
His phone rang. Henry.
He answered.
"Tell me you are not still in that car park," Henry said immediately.
"I'm looking for her."
"Gabriel, listen to me very carefully. This is now a public story. Every outlet in the country has the basics and they are filling in the rest as fast as they can. If you go to her door right now, if there is any kind of confrontation, any cameras, any scene, it becomes the only story anyone talks about for the next six months." Henry's voice was controlled and tight. "You need to come back to the office. You need to let the legal team handle first contact. You need to be strategic."
Gabriel looked out the car window.
"She has my children," he said. "She has been raising my children for three years and she is in this city right now putting distance between us as fast as she can."
"I know. And you will deal with that. But not like this."
Gabriel ended the call.
Evander rang thirty seconds later.
"I have an address," Evander said. No preamble. No questions about whether this was a good idea. Just the information, delivered straight. "Registered to Iris Lane, which is a professional alias for Iris Mercer. Property ownership confirmed. It's a residential house, purchased fourteen months ago."
He wrote nothing down. He didn't need to. He had the kind of memory that locked addresses in permanently on the first hearing.
"Thank you," Gabriel said.
"Do you want me to come?"
"No."
He told his driver the address.
The city moved past the car windows. Gabriel sat in the back and looked at his own hands and thought about the child on Iris's hip who had turned to look back at the hall with grey eyes. His eyes. Looking out of a face he had never seen before today. A face he should have known for three years.
He thought about his father walking past a seven year old boy at the top of a staircase.
He thought about how clearly he had promised himself he would never be that. That he would never be a man who walked past his own child.
He had become it anyway. Not by walking past. By walking out.
He pressed his knuckle against his mouth and breathed through that.
The car slowed as they reached the neighborhood. Quiet streets. Good trees. The kind of area where someone had worked very deliberately to build a calm, safe life.
His driver stopped outside a house with warm windows and a garden gate and a child's small boot sitting on the front step that someone had forgotten to bring inside.
Gabriel got out of the car.
He walked to the door.
He knocked.
And then he stood there on the step with three years of everything he had refused to feel sitting in his chest, and he waited for the woman he had never stopped loving to open the door.