SHE TOOK A BULLET FOR HIS TWINS—CEO REALIZES HIS NANNY WAS ALWAYS HIS FAMILY
## CHAPTER 8
When Elena finally flew home, the apartment felt different in her absence, a little quieter, a little more aware of the shape she’d left behind. Selene found herself missing her in a way that surprised her with its intensity, not just as a daughter misses a mother, but as someone missing the particular comfort of having every important person in her life gathered under one roof, however briefly. Bastian noticed the shift too. “You miss her,” he said one evening, not a question. “I always miss her. It’s just louder right now.” He considered this. “We could fly her back more often. Not just for visits. If she wanted to be closer.” Selene looked at him carefully. “You’d do that?” “I’ve been thinking about it since she arrived,” he admitted. “There’s no reason she needs to manage her treatment alone in Chicago’s suburbs when she could be somewhere with better specialists, better everything, and closer to you. If she wanted that.” The offer sat between them, generous in a way that still occasionally startled Selene, this man who had once seemed capable of nothing but careful, guarded precision now routinely finding ways to extend warmth into corners of her life she hadn’t expected him to notice.
Summer arrived, and with it a rhythm that felt, for the first time since Selene had walked through those mahogany doors in October, genuinely settled. The twins turned two in June, a small party in the apartment’s private garden terrace that Bastian insisted on despite Selene’s gentle suggestion that toddlers barely register birthdays and elaborate celebrations were unnecessary. He wanted it anyway, and Selene understood, without either of them saying so directly, that the party was as much about him marking a milestone he’d once feared he wouldn’t survive to see as it was about the twins themselves, a quiet private triumph disguised as balloons and cake and a small mountain of gifts the twins were far too young to properly appreciate. Elena flew back for the occasion, her treatment now, following Bastian’s quiet insistence, relocated to a specialist clinic in Chicago that had significantly improved her prognosis, close enough that she visited most weekends rather than the rare, expensive trips of the previous year.
Briggs, the security lead, had become something like a fixture in Selene’s peripheral awareness by then, his morning nod as she pushed the stroller through the lobby a small, reassuring constant, one of the many quiet routines that had come to define her days in ways she hadn’t expected when she’d first walked past his post with nothing but nervous determination and a folder of references. The investigation into Renwick Gale’s network had concluded months earlier, the loose threads tied off with the same quiet efficiency that characterized everything in Bastian’s world, and though Selene understood she would never know the full details of what that resolution had actually involved, she had stopped needing to know. Some things, she had learned, existed in the spaces where careful people simply trusted each other not to ask.