Chapter 2 - The Boy in the Worn Shoes
The two hundred guests in the penthouse held their breath. Cameras stopped flashing. The jazz band lowered their instruments to a faint, uncertain murmur.
Daniel knelt down on the cold marble floor. He didn't care about the custom crease of his trousers or the millions of dollars represented by the people watching him. He looked directly at Sophia, his expression softening into a warmth no one in the corporate world had ever seen from him.
"Hi, Sophia," Daniel said gently.
Sophia peeked out from her mother's shoulder, her big brown eyes blinking away a tear. "Hi."
"Is that a purple sun you were coloring in the kitchen?" he asked, pointing a thumb back toward the pantry.
She nodded solemnly. "Purple sun."
"I think a purple sun is brilliant," Daniel smiled, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a silk handkerchief. He gently wiped a tiny smudge of purple crayon from her thumb. "And I think your dress is beautiful. Yellow is my favorite color."
Maria looked up at Daniel, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock and desperate gratitude. "Mr. Mercer, please, I can leave—"
"You're not going anywhere, Maria," Daniel said, standing back up and offering a hand to help her to her feet. He turned slowly to face the crowd, his gaze locking onto Victoria, whose beautiful face was already beginning to tighten with embarrassment.
"Daniel, what on earth are you doing?" Victoria hissed under her breath, stepping closer so only he could hear. "You're making a scene. Everyone is looking at you. You're humiliating me in front of my parents' friends."
"No, Victoria," Daniel said, his voice carrying clearly across the silent, five-million-dollar penthouse. "You humiliated yourself the second you opened your mouth."
He looked at Blair, then at the legal executives who had looked away, his eyes blazing with a terrifying intensity.
"Twenty-five years ago, I stood in a room just like this one," Daniel announced, his voice steady and powerful. "My mother was cleaning the offices of a real estate firm on Michigan Avenue. I was seven years old, wearing a pair of shoes with holes in the soles, waiting for her in the hallway. A woman in a fur coat walked past me, laughed, and told her friend that poverty shouldn't be allowed in the building because it ruined the aesthetic."
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He stepped closer to Victoria, his dark eyes narrowing.
"I built Mercer Urban Holdings so that no child would ever have to feel the way I felt that night. I built this company to give people dignity. And I will damn well not allow anyone—especially not the woman wearing my mother's ring—to bring that kind of trashy, elitist cruelty into my home."
