Chapter 2 - THE FLASHING LIGHTS AND SHATTERED TRUTHS
The silence on the line stretched so thin it felt like it might snap and take Griffin’s sanity with it.
“Are you our daddy?”
The question, asked in a voice so small and terrified, echoed in the confined space of his Aston Martin. Griffin’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. Ten years. Ten years he had spent convincing himself that Sloan Callaway was a closed chapter, a woman who had realized she couldn't handle the intense, suffocating pressure of the Drake family empire and had run for the hills.
“I…” Griffin’s voice broke. The man who ruthlessly dismantled Fortune 500 companies could barely draw breath. “I’m a very good friend of your mom’s, Hazel. And I’m going to be there in three minutes. Do you hear the sirens yet?”
“Yes,” Iris’s voice chimed in, trembling. “They’re outside.”
“Let them in. I’m pulling up right now.”
Griffin abandoned his car at the curb of the modest Seattle suburb, not caring about parking laws. The rain was torrential now. He sprinted up the walkway just as the paramedics kicked the front door wide open, a stretcher rattling between them.
He bypassed the EMTs, his eyes locking onto the scene in the living room. Sloan. She was agonizingly pale, her dark hair splayed across the architectural blueprints she’d clearly been working on. And kneeling beside her, clutching each other, were two little girls with his exact steel-gray eyes.
The resemblance was like a physical blow to his chest. They had Sloan’s delicate nose, her cascade of dark curls, but those eyes—they were all Drake.
“Sir, we need you to step back!” a paramedic barked, shining a penlight into Sloan’s unresponsive pupils. “We’ve got a suspected ruptured aneurysm. We need to move, now!”
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Griffin didn’t flinch. He scooped the two terrified girls into his arms, ignoring the mud on his expensive suit. “I’m riding in the ambulance,” he declared, his tone leaving absolutely no room for debate. “And these girls are coming with me.”
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