Selene's POV
The moment the wheels hit Lagos soil, Selene Adaeze Obi stopped shaking.
It was habit by now—the way she forced her spine straight, her jaw tight, her breathing even. Three years of it. Three years of choosing calm the way other people chose oxygen. And it worked. It always worked. She looked unbreakable because she had made herself unbreakable.
She gripped Kofi's small hand as they moved through arrivals, his weight shifting sleepily against her hip. The airport was chaos—the blessed, anonymous kind. Rushing bodies. Shouting porters. Families colliding into each other with shrieks and laughter. The kind of noise that let you disappear if you knew how.
And Selene knew how.
"Mummy, my ears feel funny," Kofi whispered, his head tilted back against her shoulder.
"I know, baby. We'll pop them soon. We're almost at the car." She said it the way she said everything—steady, sure, like she wasn't seconds away from seeing her entire plan unravel.
Because she wasn't. That was the point. Control meant anticipation. It meant she'd studied every detail of Lagos's business landscape for six months before stepping foot here. It meant she knew Osei Holdings' quarterly reports better than she knew her own heartbeat. It meant she had a strategy for every possible move, every possible rival, every possible—
The screen above arrivals flashed.
INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE AWARD: 2024
And there he was.
Damien Kai Osei, CEO of Osei Holdings. The man she'd spent the last six months destroying in professional silence. The man whose company she'd outbid three times. The man whose face she'd learned the way other women learned their lovers' faces—by studying it for signs of weakness.
He wore a charcoal suit on the screen. No expression. No triumph. Just that glacial, untouchable composure that made people want to either worship him or break him.
She wanted to break him.
Selene's jaw tightened so hard her teeth ached. She made herself look away, made herself keep walking, made herself think about the sustainable fashion empire she was about to rebuild and—
"Mummy."
Kofi's voice was different. Smaller. The kind of small that meant he'd gone completely still in the way he did when something confused him. He didn't do confusion often. He was three years old and already carried the quiet watchfulness of someone much older. Someone familiar.
She looked down. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking up. At the screen.
At Damien.
Selene's heart stopped.
Not metaphorically. It actually stopped, like someone had reached into her chest and grabbed it and squeezed. Because Kofi's head was tilted at that exact angle—that particular, distinctive angle—that meant he was studying something. And his jaw, his small, precious, three-year-old jaw, had gone rigid in that way that made him look like a tiny, serious old man. And his eyes—those dark, impossible eyes—were locked on Damien Osei's face like he was trying to solve a puzzle.
Like he was looking in a mirror.
No. No, that was panic talking. That was three years of careful distance collapsing into ten seconds of pure terror. It was coincidence. It was—
"Mummy, why does that man look like me?"
The question was asked in Kofi's small, matter-of-fact voice. The voice that didn't understand it was impossible. The voice that didn't know it was shattering everything Selene had carefully, painstakingly rebuilt.
She stopped walking.
Every single person around her kept moving. The chaos of the airport floor continued without her. But Selene had become a statue, her hand frozen on Kofi's back, her breath caught somewhere between her lungs and her throat.
On the screen, Damien Osei accepted his award with a single nod.
He looked exactly like her son.
Same jaw. Same brows—those impossible, distinctive brows that Selene had always thought were unique to Kofi. Same way of going completely still when the world was moving. Same quiet intensity in his eyes. Even the way he stood—slightly forward-facing, as if braced for something.
Her son had his eyes. Her son had his eyes.
"Come on, baby," she heard herself say. Her voice sounded normal. Good. She was good at sounding normal. "Let's go find Zara."
She didn't let herself look back at the screen. She didn't let herself think. She picked up her carry-on with the hand that wasn't holding Kofi, and she kept walking—because stopping meant falling and she had already fallen once, three years ago, into a masked bar where a stranger with quiet hands had held hers without asking for anything.
A stranger who'd never told her his name.
A stranger who apparently lived in Lagos and ran a corporation and had been her business rival since the moment she'd stepped off the plane.
A stranger whose son had just pointed at his face on an airport screen and asked why he looked like him.
Selene's hands started shaking.
She'd spent three years controlling everything—her grief, her anger, her fear, her love. She'd transformed pain into strategy and heartbreak into ambition. She'd built a company from nothing. She'd raised a child alone. She'd made herself into someone who couldn't be broken again.
And in four seconds—in the time it took for an award ceremony to flash across an airport screen and her son to make one quiet observation—it had all become a lie.
Because she could not—could not—be in Lagos with Damien Osei's son.
She could not have her revenge if the man she was meant to destroy was standing three feet behind her in an arrivals hall, his face still on the screen, his eyes still looking out over a city that didn't know it held Selene's most dangerous secret.
Kofi tugged her hand.
"Mummy, you're hurting my fingers."
She released him immediately, forced herself to breathe, forced herself to turn.
Zara was waiting at arrivals with a sign that said WELCOME HOME, WARRIOR QUEEN.
But behind Zara, walking with purpose straight toward them, his phone in hand and his eyes up, was a man in an expensive suit. His tie was dark. His expression was focused. And when he looked up from his phone, his gaze swept across the crowd with the precision of someone used to finding what he was looking for.
Selene's blood turned to ice.
It was him.
Damien Osei was walking directly toward her.