“You thought you could hide?” he sneered.
He attacked her, choking and beating her.
Darkness began to close in.
Suddenly Ryan was pulled away by two men in black.
Adrian stood at the end of the alley, fury blazing in his eyes.
“Who did this?” he demanded softly.
He pulled Hannah into his arms.
“He’ll never touch you again.”
Ryan disappeared that night.
Hannah never saw him again.
“Why did you do this for me?” she asked.
“Because I couldn’t save my own family,” Adrian replied. “But I could save you.”
Slowly, their lives intertwined.
Sophie began calling him “Papa.”
Adrian broke down in tears the first time he heard it.
“I don’t deserve that word.”
“You do,” Hannah told him.
Months later Adrian collapsed in his study.
He confessed he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
Only a few months left.
He wanted to spend his final days protecting Hannah and Sophie.
Then he made a proposal.
“Marry me,” he said quietly. “When I die, everything I own will belong to you and Sophie.”
Hannah agreed on one condition.
“We become a real family.”
They married in the garden two weeks later.
But three weeks after the wedding, a doctor from Germany called.
There had been a mistake.
Adrian didn’t have cancer at all.