Sophie’s POV
Adrian leaves early for another meeting he won't explain.
"Business," he says, pressing a distracted kiss to my forehead. "I'll be back before dinner."
"What kind of business?"
"The boring kind." He's already reaching for his keys, his mind clearly somewhere else. "Rest. Take care of yourself. I'll have Bellamy check on you."
The door closes behind him before I can ask anything else.
I wait by the window, watching his car pull out of the garage, merge into traffic, disappear around the corner. Only when I'm certain he's gone do I reach for my laptop.
The name Lolita gave me: Marcus Lewis. The place: a warehouse district on the city's industrial outskirts. I pull up a search engine and start typing.
At first, nothing useful.
The name is common enough—dozens of Marcus Lewises populate the results, none of them connected to anything that explains Adrian's past.
The warehouse district is too vague, encompassing blocks of industrial buildings that could house anything from legitimate businesses to criminal enterprises.
But I'm patient. Desperation makes you patient.
I cross-reference old news articles with business registrations, police reports with property records.
I search for combinations of terms—warehouse district, investigations, criminal activity—filtering by date, by location, by anything that might narrow the flood of information into something useful.
Hours blur together. The morning light shifts to afternoon. My back aches from hunching over the laptop, and the baby protests my stillness with increasingly insistent kicks.
Bellamy appears in the doorway.
"Working hard?" His voice is carefully neutral, but I catch him glancing at my screen.
I angle the laptop away, pulling up a saved document from my coursework. "Essay on post-colonial narrative structures. Thrilling stuff."
"Sounds like it."
"Did you need something?"
"Just checking." He lingers a moment longer, something unreadable in his expression. "You've been in here for hours. Should eat something."
"I will. Just want to finish this section."
He nods slowly, unconvinced but unwilling to push. "I'll be in the kitchen."
The moment he's gone, I return to my search.
An hour later, Bellamy reappears with a sandwich I didn't ask for. He sets it on the desk beside me without comment, glances at my screen—still displaying the decoy essay—and leaves again.
I eat mechanically, one hand on the keyboard, scrolling through search results that refuse to yield anything useful.
Then I find it. An article from fifteen years ago, buried in the archives of a local newspaper that's since gone out of business.
The headline makes my stomach clench: ‘Criminal Investigation Targets Organized Network in Warehouse District.’
I click through, scanning the text with growing dread.
Money laundering. Smuggling—goods, primarily, though the article hints at darker possibilities left uninvestigated. A network that operated for years under the radar, protected by connections in business and politics.
The investigation ultimately went nowhere—most cases dismissed due to insufficient evidence, key witnesses refusing to testify, documents mysteriously vanishing before trial.
The article names several suspects. Most mean nothing to me—unfamiliar names attached to unfamiliar faces. But one stands out, bolded in my mind even though the text treats it no differently than the others.
‘Marcus Lewis, described by investigators as a "senior figure with familial connections to prominent academic circles," was among those questioned but never formally charged.’
Familial connections to prominent academic circles.
My blood chills.
I dig deeper, searching now with focused intensity. Marcus Lewis. Criminal investigation. Warehouse district. The combinations yield more results—fragments, mostly, pieces of a puzzle that's been deliberately scattered.
Then I find the photograph.
It's grainy, dated, clearly taken by a journalist from across the street. A group of men standing outside a nondescript building, their faces partially obscured by shadow and distance.
The caption identifies them as "persons of interest" in the ongoing investigation.
I zoom in, squinting at the pixelated faces. In the corner, younger but unmistakable: Adrian.
Early twenties, sharp-eyed, his posture already carrying that predatory grace I know so well. He's standing beside an older man—late fifties, maybe early sixties—with the same jaw, the same stance, the same way of holding himself like he owns every inch of space around him.
His father. It has to be. I sit back, heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
Adrian wasn't just pulled into shady business after Lolita left him. His family was embedded in it. This wasn't youthful rebellion or a temporary fall from grace. This was legacy. Inheritance. A darkness passed down through blood, waiting for him to claim it.
I think about Bellamy. About the debt between them that neither will explain. About the way Adrian handles crisis—too competent, too calm, like he's done it before. About skills that a literature professor shouldn't possess and connections that reach further than academic circles.
I think about the man sleeping beside me every night, touching me, fathering my child.
How much of him do I actually know?
The photograph stares back at me from the screen. A version of Adrian I've never met—younger, harder, standing in the shadow of a father who built an empire on crime.
I save everything. The article, the photograph, the scraps of information I've pieced together over hours of searching. I create a folder buried deep in my files, encrypted with a password Adrian would never guess.
Then I clear my browser history. Delete my search terms. Close every tab until my laptop looks exactly as innocent as it did this morning.
When Adrian comes home that night, I'm curled up on the couch with a book I'm not reading.
"How was your day?" He crosses to me, loosening his tie, looking tired but less distant than he has in weeks.
"Quiet. Got some work done on my essay." The lie comes out smooth, practiced. "How were your meetings?"
"Productive." He doesn't elaborate. Never does.
I set down my book, reach for him. Pull him close and kiss him like nothing has changed—deep and slow, my fingers threading through his hair, my body pressing against his.
He responds instinctively, his hands finding my waist, his mouth moving against mine with familiar hunger.
"What was that for?" He's smiling when we break apart, genuinely pleased.
"Do I need a reason?"
"No." He kisses me again, softer this time. "No, you don't."
That night, I lie beside him in the darkness, listening to his breathing slow into sleep. Everything has changed.
The man I'm building a life with has a past darker than I imagined. A legacy of crime. A family embedded in something that destroyed lives and evaded justice.
And somewhere in that history is the answer to every question he's refused to answer—the debt to Bellamy, the secrets he guards, the shadows that follow him even now.
I don't know what to do with this knowledge. Don't know if I should confront him, keep digging, or bury what I've found and pretend I never looked.
But I know one thing with absolute certainty, I can't unknow it. And that changes everything.