Evelyn splashed freezing water on her face, gripping the edges of the marble sink in Suite 4502.
Breathe, she told her reflection. You are not that helpless girl anymore. She had a massive acquisition meeting in an hour. She couldn't afford to let a ghost from five years ago derail her entire meticulously planned return to the country. Alexander Sterling was just a man. A dangerously powerful, terrifyingly perceptive man, yes—but just a man. She just needed to avoid him.
Smoothing down her tailored skirt, she grabbed her briefcase. "Leo, sweetheart," she called out, stepping into the living area. "I need to head to the branch office. Miss Sarah is coming up to babysit. Do not leave this room, understand?"
Leo didn't look up from his laptop. "Understood, Mommy. I am currently engaged in... architectural review. Have a productive meeting."
Evelyn smiled, shaking her head at her son's eccentric vocabulary. She opened the heavy oak door of their suite and stepped into the hallway.
She didn't even make it three steps.
The plush carpet of the corridor was suddenly swarming with men in immaculate black suits. They moved with terrifying military precision, sealing off the elevators and blocking the stairwells.
And standing right in the center of it all, exuding an aura of absolute, freezing dominance, was Alexander Sterling.
Evelyn's heart violently slammed against her ribs. The scent of sharp cedarwood and cold rain flooded her senses, completely suffocating her.
Alexander's ice-blue eyes snapped toward her. The moment his gaze locked onto hers, the temperature in the hallway plummeted to absolute zero. He didn't look confused like he did at the airport. He looked like a predator who had just trapped his prey.
"Clear the floor," Alexander ordered, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that sent a shockwave of terror down Evelyn's spine.
Within seconds, the bodyguards retreated to the perimeter, leaving Evelyn completely alone with the most dangerous man in the city.
He closed the distance between them in three long, predatory strides. Evelyn instinctively backed up, but her shoulders hit the wall. Alexander planted one large, heavily veined hand against the wallpaper right next to her head, effectively caging her in.
He was so close she could feel the heat radiating off his chest.
"I have to admit," Alexander murmured, his voice deadly soft, leaning in until his lips were mere inches from her ear. "Using a proxy chain to mask a local IP was clever. But leaving a digital breadcrumb directly to this suite? That was arrogant. Who are you working for?"
Evelyn stared at him, her mind blanking. Proxy chains? IP? What was he talking about?
"I—I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Sterling," she forced out, her voice trembling despite her best efforts to keep it steady. "Let me go."
Alexander's eyes narrowed, his gaze trailing down her face, studying her features with a terrifying intensity. He was analyzing her. Searching for a lie.
"You ran from me at the airport," he stated, his thumb lightly, dangerously brushing against her jawline. "And now I track a catastrophic breach of my empire's core mainframe to your exact hotel room. Do not play dumb with me. Give me the laptop, and tell me which corporate rat hired you, or I will ensure you never see the light of day again."
He thought she was a corporate spy. He hadn't recognized her from that night five years ago.
Relief and fresh panic warred in Evelyn's chest. "I didn't hack you!" she protested, pushing against his solid chest, which felt like pushing against a brick wall. "I am the Creative Director of—"
Click.
The door to Suite 4502 slowly creaked open.
Alexander's head snapped toward the sound, his eyes dark with lethal intent.
Standing in the doorway was a five-year-old boy. He was wearing perfectly ironed miniature slacks, holding a heavily modified laptop in one hand and a half-empty juice box in the other.
"Take your hand off my mother," Leo said. His voice was childish, yet it held a chilling, robotic calm.
Alexander froze. His hand slowly dropped from the wall. He stared down at the boy. The resemblance was no longer a passing thought; it was a physical blow. The jawline, the nose, the exact shade of those freezing blue eyes. It was like staring into a temporal mirror.
"You..." Alexander breathed out, entirely derailed for the first time in his life.
Leo took a sip of his apple juice, his expression completely flat. "Your network's encapsulation is a joke, Mr. Sterling. Leaving your private variables and core data structures completely exposed? I didn't even need to write a polymorphic worm to bypass your firewalls. A basic script was enough."
The billionaire CEO, the man who could crash the stock market with a single phone call, stood paralyzed in the hallway. He looked from the terrifyingly genius five-year-old hacker, back to the woman pinned against the wall.
Leo pushed his glasses up his nose. "Now, step away from her, or I will initiate a recursive deletion algorithm on your offshore accounts. O of N time complexity. It will take exactly three seconds."