Chapter 7 - THE THING VICTOR REALLY WANTED
Stellan refused the trade before the video finished.
“He doesn’t want Fern,” he said.
“He literally asked for her.”
“He wants me to believe he does.”
“Then what does he want?”
“Proof.”
“Of what?”
“That she’s mine.”
Fern changed that.
Under an old family holding agreement, a direct child of the sitting Cross chairman would inherit a protected block of voting shares at birth once paternity was legally acknowledged.
I stared at him.
“You people wrote succession rules for babies?”
“My grandfather trusted paperwork more than people.”
“And now a murderer wants my daughter because of shares?”
“Because those shares make it harder to erase my line.”
I stood. “Then don’t acknowledge her.”
Stellan looked at me.
“I won’t put her name anywhere without your consent.”
That surprised me.
“But Victor already suspects,” he continued. “The DNA theft was his attempt to confirm it.”
Elias entered with a laptop.
“We traced Loretta’s video.”
“Where?”
“An abandoned funeral home on the South Side.”
Stellan prepared a rescue team.
I stayed with Fern in a secured room and tried not to imagine my mother dying because of me.
Forty minutes later, Stellan called.
“We have her.”
My knees buckled.
“Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“Victor?”
“Gone.”
Of course.
When my mother arrived at the mansion, she looked twenty years older.
She hugged me and sobbed into my shoulder.
“I’m sorry.”
I wanted to forgive her.
I could not yet.
Then she saw Stellan holding Fern.
Her entire body went rigid.
“No.”
Stellan’s expression changed.
“What?”
My mother backed away.
“No, no, no.”
“Mom?”
She pointed at Stellan’s scar.
“I’ve seen that scar before.”
Stellan went still.
“Where?”
May you like
My mother looked at me.
“The night Selene was born.”
