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HE CHOSE THE MAID’S CHILD OVER A BILLION-DOLLAR EMPIRE—And Exposed His Fiancée’s Darkest Secret! / Chapter 3 / 6

Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Faded Dress

Three days passed, and the media circus intensified. Celeste appeared on national television, weeping elegantly, painting herself as the victim of a cruel, unstable billionaire who was being manipulated by an opportunistic maid.

Meanwhile, Adrian had moved Elena and Lily into his private penthouse downtown, away from the estate and the paparazzi.

One afternoon, while Lily was napping, Elena was washing the very dress Lily had worn to the gala—the blue one with the yellow daisies. As she scrubbed the hem, her finger hit a hard, unnatural lump inside the lining of the fabric.

Frowning, Elena took a pair of scissors and carefully snipped the thread.

Out fell a tiny, micro-encrypted flash drive wrapped in a waterproof plastic casing.

Elena’s heart pounded. She recognized this dress. It had belonged to Adrian’s late mother, Evelyn Voss, who had passed away under mysterious circumstances two years ago. Evelyn had given a box of old children's clothes to Elena just weeks before she died, telling her to save them for when Lily grew older.

Elena immediately called Adrian into the room.

Adrian plugged the flash drive into his encrypted laptop. The screen flashed, requiring a biometric password. Adrian placed his thumb on the scanner.

The screen opened to a folder titled: THE WHITMORE DECEPTION.

Inside were hundreds of financial documents, audio recordings, and medical files. As Adrian clicked through them, his face turned pale.

"My god," Adrian whispered.

"What is it, Adrian?" Elena asked, leaning closer.

"My mother didn't die of a stroke, Elena," Adrian said, his voice trembling with a mixture of grief and horror. "She discovered that the Whitmore family was running a massive, multi-billion-dollar international money-laundering scheme through our shipping harbors. And Celeste... Celeste wasn't just my fiancée. She was the mastermind who coordinated the entire operation."

The documents proved that Celeste had systematically poisoned Evelyn Voss with an undetectable synthetic toxin over six months to keep her quiet. And the joint-venture contract that Adrian had torn up at the gala was designed to legally absorb Voss Industries into the scheme, effectively framing Adrian if the authorities ever found out.

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The ink on the emergency audit report was barely dry when the secure terminal on my desk flashed a violent crimson. I hadn't slept in thirty-six hours, my eyes burning from staring at columns of ghost figures, duplicate invoices, and shell corporations linked to Dominic Rossi. But the red alert wasn’t from Rossi’s faction. It was an internal security flag originating from the estate’s main vault deep beneath the west wing.

The ink on the emergency audit report was barely dry when the secure ter...

The glass shattered into a thousand tiny diamonds on the marble, scattering the light from the chandeliers. The muffled laughter died instantly, replaced by a suffocating, heavy silence that crept outward from the grand staircase.

The glass shattered into a thousand tiny diamonds on the marble, scatter...

The heavy oak doors of my private study clicked shut behind us, locking out the clinical, terrifying silence of the kitchen. Evelyn Crane stood stiffly in front of my mahogany desk, her hands folded over her apron with the rigid precision of someone who had spent decades micromanaging every square inch of my estate. Behind her, Norah hovered near the doorway, clutching her clipboard like a shield.

The heavy oak doors of my private study clicked shut behind us, locking...

"By tearing up that contract," Adrian realized, "I didn't just lose an empire. I accidentally saved myself from execution or life in prison."

But before they could download the data to a backup drive, the penthouse lights suddenly went out. The security alarms blared a warning code: BREACH IN PERIMETER.

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