Chapter 2 - The Secret Behind the Champion
The door opened slowly.
Everyone in the restaurant turned toward it.
I didn't.
Because I already knew that voice.
"Sadie."
My entire body froze.
I hadn't heard that voice in seven years.
Not since the night my life fell apart.
Not since the night I lost everything.
The man standing in the doorway looked older than I remembered.
His hair was shorter.
His face had more lines.
But I would have recognized him anywhere.
My uncle Daniel.
The man who disappeared the same night my father died.
The room that had been filled with laughter seconds earlier became completely silent.
Adrian Voss stared at him.
Not with surprise.
With anger.
A dangerous kind of anger.
The kind that made every person around him step away.
"How are you alive?" Adrian asked.
My heart stopped.
Those words weren't meant for me.
They were meant for the man standing behind me.
Daniel looked at Adrian.
"I could ask you the same thing."
Nobody moved.
Nobody breathed.
I looked between them.
Trying to understand.
Trying to find the missing pieces.
Because my entire life, I had believed one story.
My father was killed in a car accident.
My uncle disappeared afterward because he couldn't handle the guilt.
That was what everyone told me.
That was what I forced myself to believe.
But the way Adrian and Daniel looked at each other told me there was another story.
A much darker one.
"Sadie," Daniel said quietly.
I turned toward him.
"Why are you here?"
The question came out before I could stop it.
His eyes moved toward Marcus lying on the floor.
Then toward Adrian.
Then back to me.
"You shouldn't have accepted this fight."
I almost laughed.
Almost.
"You disappeared for seven years, and that's the first thing you say to me?"
His expression changed.
Pain.
Real pain.
"I was trying to protect you."
"From what?"
He didn't answer.
That was the answer.
I stepped closer.
"From what?"
The entire room watched us.
But I didn't care anymore.
Not about Adrian.
Not about Marcus.
Not about anyone.
Because the man standing in front of me was the reason I spent years wondering why my family was destroyed.
"You knew something about my father."
Daniel looked down.
And that confirmed it.
Adrian noticed too.
His eyes narrowed.
"Interesting."
Nobody looked at him.
He continued.
"Seven years ago, Daniel Miller vanished after stealing evidence from my organization."
My head snapped toward him.
"What?"
Daniel looked at Adrian.
"You don't get to tell her."
Adrian stood slowly.
The room instantly changed.
The playful atmosphere was gone.
This was no longer a challenge.
This was something much bigger.
"You brought her into this."
Daniel shook his head.
"No. You did."
Adrian's expression hardened.
For the first time, I saw something behind the confidence.
Fear.
Small.
Almost invisible.
But it was there.
I had spent years reading people.
Working in restaurants taught me that.
People showed their truth when they thought nobody was watching.
And Adrian Voss was afraid.
That terrified me more than anything else.
"What is happening?" I asked.
Nobody answered.
So I walked toward Adrian.
"You know my father."
Silence.
"Don't lie to me."
His eyes met mine.
"I knew your father."
The words hit harder than I expected.
My chest tightened.
"How?"
Adrian looked at the photograph still sitting on the table.
The photograph with my father's name written on the back.
"Your father wasn't just a mechanic."
I frowned.
"What?"
"He worked for people who didn't want their names known."
I felt the room spinning.
"My father fixed cars."
Adrian shook his head.
"That was what he wanted everyone to believe."
I looked at Daniel.
He looked away.
And that hurt more than Adrian's words.
Because Daniel was family.
"Tell me the truth."
Daniel closed his eyes.
"I was trying to."
"No."
My voice became louder.
"You were hiding."
Nobody spoke.
I walked toward the center of the room.
The same place where everyone had laughed at me minutes earlier.
Funny how quickly people stopped laughing when they realized the joke was on them.
Marcus slowly pushed himself up from the floor.
He looked embarrassed.
But something else was there.
Respect.
"You knew how to fight."
I looked at him.
"I knew enough."
He shook his head.
"No."
His eyes moved over me carefully.
"That wasn't enough."
He had noticed.
The way I moved.
The way I reacted.
The way I predicted his attacks.
Things I had spent years trying to forget.
Things my father taught me before he died.
Adrian noticed too.
"Your father trained you."
I didn't respond.
Because the answer was obvious.
When I was sixteen, my father started teaching me things he said I would never need.
How to read body language.
How to defend myself.
How to escape dangerous situations.
At the time, I thought he was being paranoid.
Now I understood.
He was preparing me.
For this.
For a world I didn't know existed.
"Why?" I whispered.
Adrian looked at me.
"Because your father knew someone would come looking for you."
My stomach dropped.
"Who?"
Before Adrian could answer, every phone in the room buzzed at the same time.
The sound echoed through the restaurant.
Everyone looked down.
Messages.
Dozens of them.
The bodyguards immediately reached for their weapons.
Marcus grabbed Adrian's shoulder.
"Boss."
Adrian picked up one phone.
His expression changed.
"What does it say?" I asked.
He didn't answer.
That scared me.
"Adrian."
He finally looked at me.
"The person who sent this knows you're here."
My blood went cold.
Daniel stepped forward.
"That's impossible."
Adrian turned the phone around.
I saw the message.
One sentence.
One name.
My name.
SADIE MILLER IS ALIVE.
The room went completely silent.
Someone had been watching me.
Someone had known exactly where I was.
And suddenly, the biggest question wasn't why Adrian Voss knew my father.
It was why someone had spent seven years believing I was dead.
I looked at Daniel.
"Who did you tell?"
His face went pale.
"I didn't tell anyone."
A loud crash came from the restaurant entrance.
The front doors had locked automatically.
The bodyguards moved into position.
Adrian looked toward the darkness beyond the glass.
Then he whispered something that made everyone freeze.
"They found us."
I turned toward the door.
A shadow appeared behind the glass.
Then another.
Then another.
And the first person stepped inside carrying something I recognized immediately.
My father's old pocket watch.
The one buried with him.
May you like
The one that should have been impossible to find.
The stranger looked directly at me and said my father's name.
