POV Zayden

The call came at 3:47 AM Zurich time, cutting through the hospital quiet like a scalpel through skin.

I was dozing in the chair beside Mia’s bed, neck twisted at an angle that would require physical therapy, when my phone lit up with a number I’d blocked six different times.

Marcus. My former assistant. The man who’d probably spent the last month updating his résumé and practicing his “I never really knew Zayden Wolfe” speech.

“Sir.” His voice cracked like he’d been crying, which would have been funny if it wasn’t so fucking pathetic. “You need to know—”

“I don’t need to know anything,” I started, but he cut me off.

“Harrison’s had a stroke.”

The words hit like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. I sat up straighter, careful not to disturb Mia’s sleep. “When?”

“Two hours ago. Massive. They’re saying—” His voice broke completely. “They’re saying it’s bad.”

The media exploded within minutes. My phone started buzzing like an angry hornet’s nest—reporters, board members, distant relatives who’d ignored my existence until I became tabloid-worthy again. The headlines practically wrote themselves:

WOLFE PATRIARCH SUFFERS STROKE AS FAMILY EMPIRE CRUMBLES

HARRISON WOLFE HOSPITALIZED AMID GRANDSON’S SCANDAL

DYNASTY IN CRISIS: WOLFE HEIR ABSENT AS GRANDFATHER FIGHTS FOR LIFE

Vultures. Every last one of them.

By dawn, the board had tracked down my location.

Emergency conference call, voices crackling through international phone lines with that particular brand of panic that happens when rich people realize their money might be in jeopardy.

“He’s asking for you,” Margaret Chen said, her usual composure cracked around the edges. “The doctors say—he may not have long.”

“Then he should have thought of that before he tried to kill my daughter,” I replied, voice cold enough to freeze champagne.

Silence on the line. The kind that happens when people realize they’re dealing with someone who’s already burned every bridge and has matches left over.

“Zayden.” This from Richard Steinberg, Harrison’s oldest friend and the closest thing to a conscience the board possessed. “He’s dying. He wants to see you. Whatever happened between you two—”

“What happened is that he weaponized a child’s cancer treatment for leverage,” I cut him off. “There’s no forgiveness for that. Not from me. Not ever.”

I hung up.

Jocelyn was awake when I turned around, studying my face with those brown eyes that saw through every wall I’d ever built.

“You have to go back,” she said quietly.

“Like hell I do.”

“Zayden—”

“I won’t go back,” I said, voice harder than I intended. “Not for him. Not for anything. He made his choice when he pulled Mia’s funding. Now he can die with it.”

But Mia was watching from her hospital bed, those green eyes—my eyes—taking in every word with the kind of intensity that only children possess. The kind that cuts through adult bullshit like a laser.

“Doesn’t family matter?” she asked quietly, voice small but clear enough to shatter my resolve completely.

I stared at my daughter. This beautiful, fierce little girl who’d never had the luxury of a grandfather’s love, who’d grown up with stories about tigers instead of trust funds, who somehow still believed in the possibility of forgiveness.

Christ.

I packed a bag.

The flight to New York felt like traveling backward through time, each mile stripping away the man I’d been trying to become in Zurich.

By the time we landed at JFK, I was hollow-eyed and running on fury and caffeine.

The hospital smelled like disinfectant and death, sterile corridors echoing with the soft beeping of machines keeping rich old men alive past their expiration dates. Harrison’s private room was on the top floor, naturally.

Even in dying, he demanded the penthouse view.

He looked smaller than I remembered. Diminished.

The oxygen mask covering half his face made him look vulnerable in a way I’d never seen before—and never wanted to see again. His eyes opened when I entered, focusing on me with effort that seemed to cost him everything he had left.

“Zayden.” The word came out as barely a whisper, muffled by plastic and the sound of machines breathing for him.

I didn’t move closer. Didn’t take the chair someone had positioned hopefully beside his bed.

Just stood there in my expensive coat, hands in my pockets, studying the wreckage of the man who’d shaped my entire existence.

“You came,” he wheezed, trying to remove the oxygen mask with shaking fingers.

“Mia asked me to.”

Something flickered in his eyes. Pain, maybe. Or recognition of just how completely he’d lost this war.

“You were never soft,” Harrison rasped, each word a struggle. “But she made you weak.”

I stepped closer then, close enough to see the fear in his eyes. The knowledge that he was dying alone, abandoned by the grandson he’d tried to control one too many times.

“No,” I said, voice steady as a scalpel. “She made me whole.”

His hand moved toward mine, fingers trembling with the effort. A final plea for connection, for forgiveness, for some acknowledgment that blood meant something more than business.

I watched that hand reach for mine and felt nothing.

No anger. No pity. No regret.

Just the cold satisfaction of a man who’d finally chosen the right side of a war that should never have been fought.

When Harrison’s fingers grasped air instead of my hand, something broke behind his eyes. The last gasping hope that legacy could overcome love, that power could conquer choice.

“You lost,” I whispered, leaning close enough for him to hear clearly.

And walked away.