Chapter 7 - The Discovery in the DrawerBack in Chicago, the penthouse on Astor Street was dead silent.
Elias stood alone in the master bedroom, the disconnected phone still clutched in his fist like a weapon. His chest heaved with ragged breaths. His mind raced back to my words: Look in your top right dresser drawer. Right beneath the false bottom.
With three long strides, he crossed the room, yanked open the drawer of my antique dresser, and threw my remaining personal items onto the floor. Finding nothing obvious, his large hands gripped the sides of the wooden drawer and violently ripped it out of its tracks, slamming it onto the marble floor.
His fingers clawed at the cedar bottom panel, finding a hidden latch. He pressed it.
The false bottom popped open.
Inside sat a thick legal envelope stamped with a Chicago medical center’s seal. Elias’s hands shook—a tremor so foreign to him that he stared at his own fingers in disbelief. He pulled out the documents.
Medical intake forms. Prenatal vitamin prescriptions. Doctor's notes detailing fetal heart rate and development. And clipped to the front, clear as day, was the ultrasound photograph of our child.
The room seemed to spin around him.
Elias dropped to one knee, the papers scattering across the cold marble. For the first time in his thirty-five years of life, the untouchable, ruthless billionaire felt a physical pain so searing it crushed the air from his lungs. He wasn't just losing a wife who had grown tired of his neglect; he was losing an heir. He was losing the only piece of genuine human warmth he had ever been given, destroyed by his own arrogance and cold indifference.
"Sir?"
Daniel Park stood at the bedroom door, having let himself in with his emergency key. One look at Elias's face—pale, hollowed out, and twisted in absolute agony—made the attorney freeze in his tracks.
"Elias... what is it?" Daniel asked cautiously.
Elias slowly stood up. The grief in his eyes vanished in a split second, replaced by something infinitely darker, colder, and more terrifying than anything Chicago had ever witnessed.
"Daniel," Elias whispered, his voice dangerously smooth. "Call our entire legal team. Call every private contractor on our payroll. I don't care about the stocks anymore. I don't care about the logistics hub."
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He picked up the ultrasound photograph, sliding it safely into his jacket pocket.
"Find my wife. And bring me Adrian Vale’s head on a spike."
