MY HUSBAND THREW CASH AT MY FEET—UNTIL ONE PHONE CALL FROZE HIS BILLION-DOLLAR EMPIRE

“You’re dead,” I choked out, my knuckles turning white around the phone receiver. “I watched your casket go into the ground. I held your wife while she cried.”

“A closed casket, Mara,” Julian’s voice replied, entirely devoid of the warmth I remembered from childhood. “Silas tried to kill me on that yacht. I survived. But I knew if I came back, he would just try again. So I stayed in the shadows. I built my own network.”

“You built this?” I screamed, tears of pure rage burning my eyes. “You hired Grant and Vanessa? You let them drug me? You used my body to incubate your own child?!”

“Silas locked the master trust behind my bloodline,” Julian said coldly. “I needed an heir to claim the fifty billion. But I couldn't risk Silas finding out I was alive. You were the perfect vessel, Mara. Silas thought he was the one manipulating Grant to secure the fortune, but Grant works for me.”

The room spun. Silas wasn't the mastermind. My dead brother was playing Silas like a puppet, using Grant as the middleman.

“I’m taking Ellie and disappearing,” I hissed. “You will never see a dime of that money.”

“You don't understand, Mara,” Julian sighed. “I don't just need Ellie. I need the boy, too.”

I looked down at the photograph in the steel box. Vanessa holding a baby boy.

“The boy in the photo,” I whispered.

“During the IVF procedure, Vanessa harvested two of your eggs,” Julian revealed. “She implanted one in you. She implanted the other in herself as a contingency. Ellie has a twin brother named Leo. Vanessa has been raising him as her nephew.”

My knees buckled. I had a son. A son who had been stolen from me at conception, raised by the woman sleeping with my fake husband.

“Silas doesn't know about Leo,” Julian continued. “But Silas has realized Grant is double-crossing him. Silas’s men are converging on your motel right now, Mara. If you want Ellie to live, you will bring her to the helipad at Hudson Yards in one hour.”

Julian hung up.

I didn't have time to process the grief or the betrayal.

I bolted out of the apartment, sprinting down the stairs. I pulled out my falcon phone and dialed Aris.

“Aris! Get Ellie out of the motel right now! Silas’s men are—”

“Mara…” Aris’s voice choked over the line. I heard the sickening sound of a physical blow, followed by a heavy thud.

Another voice picked up the phone. It was Silas.

“You really shouldn't leave your child with strangers, Mara,” my uncle Silas purred. “She’s in the car with me now. Come to the Kingsley corporate vault, or I drop her in the river.”

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