Page 53 of Secret Baby Daddy

“That was the point with Jonah Reed.”

Roman says the name like he’s setting down a knife he’s been carrying politely concealed the entire conversation.

“Twelve years, and you still haven’t told anyone the full story, have you? How you called me for guidance. How I told you he was unstable. How you made the call to move him yourself, against every instinct you had, because you trusted my judgment over your own.”

He lets that sit, savoring it.

“I’ve always wondered if you tell yourself it was my fault entirely. Easier that way, I imagine. Easier than admitting you’re the one who put him in that house.”

I feel the air in the room change before Calder does.

I watch something happen to his face that I have never seen, not during the tackle, not during the footage argument, not even in the dark of the sealed suite when he told me, in careful pieces, about a client he’d failed.

His jaw goes rigid enough that I can see the muscle jump beneath it, and his hands, usually so deliberately still, curl slowly into fists.

I have spent nearly two weeks learning to read every version of Dominic Calder I’ve been permitted access to, and none of them prepared me for this one, a man I have watched dismantle armed threats without raising his pulse, visibly unmade by a sentence from someone who was supposed to have mentored him instead of destroying him quietly, over the better part of a decade.

“You told me he was a liability,” Calder says, and his voice has lost every ounce of its careful flatness. “You told me to move him. You made that call, Roman, not me.”

“I offered an opinion. You executed the decision.”

Roman’s smile widens, terrible in its gentleness.

“That’s the tragedy of you, Dominic. You’ve spent your whole life needing someone else to tell you what to trust, and then spent the rest of it punishing yourself for trusting them.”

Calder takes a step forward, and for one suspended second I understand, with total clarity, that he is about to do something neither of us will be able to walk back from: a security consultant striking a Northbridge representative on Merrick property, caught on whatever camera Roman undoubtedly arranged to have running, every version of the aftermath ending with Calder’s career, and possibly Sloane’s case, in ruins.

I step between them.

It isn’t strategic.

I don’t weigh the optics or draft the version of events I’ll need to give Cordelia afterward.

I simply move, planting myself in Roman’s line of sight, close enough to Calder that I can feel the tension radiating off him like heat off asphalt.

“You need to leave,” I tell Roman, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. “Now. Before I have security walk you off this property in front of whatever cameras you brought with you, and we discuss exactly why a Northbridge advisor felt entitled to trespass on a family currently the target of an active extortion investigation.”

Roman studies me, recalculating, the mask slipping just enough that I catch the cold calculation underneath.

“You’re very protective of him, Ms. Vale. For a woman who called him a glorified bodyguard less than two weeks ago.”

“People update their assessments when they get better information.”

I don’t move.

“Leave, Mr. Vasseur. Or I make a call that ends considerably worse for Northbridge’s public position than anything currently sitting in an extortionist’s folder.”

It’s a bluff, mostly, but I deliver it the way I deliver every bluff that’s ever worked: like it isn’t one.

I have delivered harder bluffs to more dangerous men, but never with this much personally at stake in whether it lands, and never for a reason that had nothing to do with a client’s reputation and everything to do with a man I did not expect to start protecting on instinct.

Roman holds my gaze a beat longer, testing it, and then, apparently deciding the risk isn’t worth whatever satisfaction he came here to collect, retrieves his coat from the chair with unhurried calm.

“Dominic.”

He pauses at the door, every ounce of his attention back on Calder.

“Do give my regards to your sister. Ingrid, isn’t it? Emergency medicine. Impressive woman.”