Stephen and Caden exchanged a quick, troubled glance.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Emma asked softly, her voice trembling. “That’s why I’m not with him?”
My stomach churned, and it felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.No.
Stephen took a moment before answering. “We’re not entirely sure. Your son believes you’re dead, but he also mentioned searching for his father and hoping you were with him. So the situation remains unclear.”
“Father?” I sounded almost hoarse. “Who’s the father?”
Emma searched my face, her whole demeanor pleading for answers I was not able to provide.
“James?” she whispered, and I was relieved to hear a glimmer of hope mixed in with her uncertainty.
“I wasn’t able to find out the exact identity of the father. However, I learned the father was, or had been, a First Offensive who had been trained by me at some point.”
“So I’m the father.” I nodded slowly, the puzzle finally coming together. It made a twisted kind of sense now.
But Stephen coughed, interrupting my thoughts. “Actually, as it stands, there are three possibilities.”
“Three?” Emma shrieked. “What do you mean, three? Who?”
The master-manipulator replied dryly, almost clinically, as if he were reciting historical facts rather than unveiling catastrophic truths. “Well, James seems the most obvious choice at this point.”
Emma opened her mouth, clearly to reply, but he wasn’t finished.
“However, considering the criteria, it could also be Caden.”
“What?” We all yelled at once.
Caden’s face went ghost-white. For the first time that evening, his cold composure cracked.
My pulse spiked—violent, erratic—as I whirled on Stephen. “Him?” I roared, jabbing a finger at the man responsible for every scar on Emma’s body. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Caden’s shock flickered, then twisted into something darker, more vicious. His jaw locked. His fists clenched. And then his eyes blazed with that calculated fury, I’d only ever seen on the battlefield.
“You’re telling me I might be the father?” His voice came out low, and lethal. “That I fuckingtorturedthe woman who could become the mother of my child?”
Each word dripped with venom, steeped in a rawness, bordering on the unforgivable.
Stephen didn’t even try to soften the blow. He simply murmured, “Yes.”
A muscle ticked in Caden’s jaw, his breaths sharp and uneven, like he was barely holding back.
“I can’t believe you’d think—” I started.
But Emma’s words cut through it all.
“You said there were three…”
I turned to her, my confusion tangling with the rising dread clawing its way up my spine.
“What?” My pulse was pounding in my ears. “Who the hell is the third?”
A beat of silence. Then?—
“Me.”
The voice was smooth. Unsettling. And impossibly familiar.
