Page 59 of After-Hours Heir

“It’s a boy,” the doctor said.

A son. He was having a son.

And he had an instant, visceral image of himself as a small boy. Looking up at his father. And his father staring back down at him with eyes black as coal. Nothing behind them.

And then he saw himself again, sitting in his office chair, and staring down at his father, now a withered old man. Prostrateon his knees begging for the kind of mercy that had never been shown to Christos.

“And now you know how it feels to be powerless.”

Panic raged through him. Like all the years of fear he hadn’t allowed himself to feel had suddenly come to rest on his shoulders.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know how to be a father.

He didn’t even know how to be a son. He knew how to cause pain. He knew how to win.

He knew how to destroy.

How was he supposed to raise a child? How was he supposed to find tenderness in his hands? In his heart.

He couldn’t breathe.

The room was tilting sideways, and he had no idea what was happening to him. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” he said.

Sylvie pushed herself up off the bed. The doctor looked over at him. But it was the nurse who crossed the room and put a stethoscope on his chest.

“You’re having a panic attack,” she said.

“I am not,” he said, wrenching his tie free, and tearing the top two buttons off his shirt. “I’ve never panicked in my life.”

“You’re panicking now,” she said.

Sylvie sat up, pushing her shirt down in place and swinging her legs off of the table. “Christos, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he growled. “Except maybe I can get an EKG, since I might be dying.”

Sylvie looked at the nurse. “He’s not dying, is he?”

“We can always double-check. But in my experience men like him live regrettably long lives.”

Sylvie ignored the poisonous words, but they hit Christos squarely as intended.Men like him.

She knew that he was a bad man. That was why she hated him.

She had seen the way that he had treated Sylvie. And for that reason, she held him in disdain.

Perhaps he should have disdain for himself.

And he was going to be a father.

“You’re not the first man to have a total and complete freak-out because you’re having a son,” she said. “But it’s preferable to the men who break things because they’re having a daughter and they’re just angry that it isn’t a son to carry on their family name.”

Family name.

He didn’t even have a family name. He had a name he had chosen for himself. A name that had come to mean… What? It was synonymous now with the ruthless way that he conducted business.

With his media empire. But what did it really mean? Would his son want to burn his name to the ground too? Just as Christos had done?

“Thank you,” she said. “You can take the private plane back whenever you want. And in the meantime, you can enjoy the city.”