My Boss, My Babydaddy

Chapter 34

Zayden’s POV

The office feels like a tomb at midnight.

Glass and steel everywhere, reflecting nothing but my own fractured face staring back from every surface.

I look like a man I don't recognize—hollow-eyed, jaw tight, the kind of exhaustion that comes from losing something you didn't know how desperately you needed until it was gone.

Natasha's file lies open on my desk, a catalog of my sins organized chronologically with the meticulous attention to detail that lawyers charge premium rates to provide.

But it's the photograph that holds my attention. The one I've avoided looking at for eight years because seeing it meant acknowledging truths I'd spent a fortune to bury.

Natasha at the charity gala, wearing red, standing in the background of the photo where I first saw the woman in silver.

Where I first saw Jocelyn.

My wife's phone stopped ringing three hours ago. That's how I know she isn't coming back tonight. Jocelyn answers her phone even when she's furious with me—has answered through every argument, every disagreement, every moment of tension we've navigated together.

The silence means something worse than anger.

I'd known this day would come, had run scenarios in my head a thousand times, trying to prepare for the moment my carefully constructed lies would finally detonate. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it tear through your chest are different animals entirely.

The pain is physical, real. Like something vital has been carved out and I'm still breathing around the absence.

Natasha and I dated for three months when I was twenty-seven. She was brilliant and beautiful and wanted things I couldn't give—commitment, vulnerability, access to parts of myself I kept locked behind steel doors even then.

"You're incapable of real connection," she'd said the night we ended it. Her voice had been steady. Clinical. A diagnosis delivered without hope of treatment. "You treat people like acquisitions. Like assets to be managed and controlled."

She'd been right. I'd known it even then.

But knowing your flaws and changing them requires courage I wouldn't develop for years. Not until a woman in a silver dress looked at me across a crowded ballroom and made me want to be someone different.

Six weeks after our breakup, Natasha called.

Pregnant, ten weeks along. My name is attached to a problem I hadn't planned for and didn't want.

My first instinct had been surgical, clean—make it disappear through the only language I spoke fluently: money.

"I can give you resources," I'd said, my tone carefully neutral. "Contacts, options."

"I'm not getting an abortion." Her voice had turned to ice. "But I don't need you. I don't want you around my child. I just want child support."

"I can offer you more than that."

The words had come easily. I'd been negotiating hostile takeovers since I was twenty-two. This was just another contract to be drafted, another problem to solve with the right combination of legal language and zeros on a check.

"Two million dollars. Lump sum. In exchange for your complete silence. Raise the child alone. No contact with me, no claim on the Wolfe name."

She'd been silent for so long I thought she'd hung up.

"I hate you." The words had finally come, quiet and venomous. "I want you to know that. I hate you for making this about money, for treating our child like a liability to be managed."

"But you'll take the deal."

"Yes." The word had been bitter, resigned. "Because I'm twenty-six and scared and two million dollars means my child will have everything he needs without relying on a father who'd rather pay to pretend he doesn't exist."

I hadn't felt anything when she said it. Not guilt, not relief—just the flat, procedural satisfaction of a negotiation concluded.

The same numbness I brought to every deal that required me to look away from the damage. I'd hung up, called my lawyer, and moved on to the next item on my calendar like I hadn't just erased a life in progress.

The papers were signed within a week. Monthly payments established through accounts no one would ever trace back to me. Problem solved. Past erased.

Except she'd come to the gala.

I'd forgotten she did consulting work for high-profile collectors. Forgotten she moved in the same circles, orbited the same events.

Or maybe I'd just convinced myself the money had made her disappear completely—rendered her invisible through the magic of financial transaction.

But there she was in the photograph—four months pregnant with my son, standing near the champagne fountain. While I stared across the room at a woman in silver who made my carefully constructed walls feel suddenly, dangerously fragile.

Natasha had watched me fall in love that night, had seen it happen in real time. The exact moment when I looked at Jocelyn and wanted, for the first time in my life, to be someone capable of feeling something real.

No wonder her hatred calcified into something permanent. Something patient enough to wait eight years for the perfect moment to destroy me.

My phone buzzes. Not Jocelyn—Landon.

"It's midnight," I say by way of greeting.

"You're still at the office?" Landon's voice is tight, the tone he uses when delivering bad news he wishes he didn't have to share.

"Yeah. I am."

A pause. Then: "I guess we're both having a fucked-up night. I'm coming up."

He appears three minutes later, suit rumpled in a way Landon's suits never are. He carries a folder that he sets on my desk with the careful precision people use when handling explosives.

"Natasha's lawyer filed papers this afternoon." His expression is grim. "I just got the courtesy notification."

"What kind of papers?"

But I already know, can feel it in the way the air has gone thin and sharp. The way my chest constricts like someone's wrapped barbed wire around my lungs.

"Custody petition." Landon's voice is flat, clinical. "She's not just establishing Eli's paternity. She's going after Mia."

The words don't make sense at first. I read them again, my brain refusing to process the meaning behind the legal terminology.

‘Petition for Sole Custody–Minor Child: Mia Rose Hartwell-Wolfe’

"That's not possible." I hear myself say it. "Mia isn't her daughter. She has no legal standing."

"She's arguing that you're an unfit father who's been hiding a child for eight years while playing house with another woman's daughter."

Landon falls into lawyer mode, emotion stripped from his voice because it won't help either of us.

"She's claiming that someone capable of that level of deception shouldn't have custody of any children. And she wants the court to place Mia with her and Eli while this all gets sorted out."

"She's dying." The objection sounds weak even to my own ears.

"Which is exactly why the court might grant temporary custody. To establish sibling relationships before it's too late. Before Eli loses his only parent and Mia gets placed with a father who's proven he can lie to the people he claims to love for nearly a decade."

The photograph stares up at me from the desk. Natasha's face turned toward the camera, toward me, and even through the years and distance I can see the expression she wears.

Not hatred—something colder, more patient.

Revenge.

"She's been planning this," I say slowly, the pieces clicking into place with horrible clarity. "The diagnosis, the timing, showing up at my office knowing Jocelyn would be there... This isn't about Eli knowing his father. This is about destroying everything I have left."

Landon doesn't disagree.

My phone stays silent. Jocelyn isn't calling, isn't answering. She is probably at Helena's or the foundation or anywhere that isn't near me.

And now Natasha is trying to take Mia.

I spent eight years paying to keep one child hidden. Now I'm about to lose them both.