Chapter 4 - The Traitor UnmaskedThe double doors of the suite blasted inward, ripped off their hinges by Donovan and two heavily armed guards. Antoine pushed past them, his face a mask of absolute carnage, a 9mm pistol gripped firmly in his right hand. His eyes scanned the room in a fraction of a second, locking instantly onto me as I shielded Mrs. Gable on the floor.
"Are you hit?" Antoine demanded, dropping to his knees beside me, his hands frantically checking my shoulders and arms for blood.
"I’m fine—we’re fine," I gasped, pointing toward the shattered window and the smoking bullet hole in the doorframe. "Someone shot through the door!"
Antoine’s head whipped around toward Donovan. "Lock down the perimeter. Nobody leaves this estate. Check every camera feed from the east wing."
Donovan nodded sharply and vanished into the hallway.
Antoine turned back to me, helping me to my feet. His grip was fiercely protective, yet his jaw was set like iron. That was when he noticed Mrs. Gable trembling against the nightstand, her hand clutching her chest.
"Mrs. Gable," Antoine said, his voice dropping an octave into a dangerous register. "What were you doing in her room at midnight?"
The elderly housekeeper looked up, tears spilling down her weathered cheeks. She didn't look at Antoine; instead, her haunted eyes drifted to the open doorway behind him, where a tall figure in a tailored grey suit stood framed by the dim corridor lights.
It wasn't a guard.
It was Julian Maro—Antoine’s younger cousin and the chief financial officer of Maro Shipping.
Julian held a silenced pistol loosely at his side. A thin, chilling smile played across his lips.
"It’s over, cousin," Julian said smoothly, stepping over the threshold. "The empire is mine. And the little waitress here just ruined three months of careful planning by showing up with a face from the past."
Antoine slowly stood up, placing me behind him as he turned to face his cousin. The air in the room grew heavy, charged with a lethal static.
"You," Antoine whispered, every muscle in his frame tensing like a coiled spring. "You authorized the record change."
"I did more than that," Julian laughed softly, raising the silenced weapon. "I arranged for your late wife’s brakes to fail on the causeway. I paid off the lead obstetrician to swap the medical files. And I arranged for the surrogate mother—this lovely, naive waitress standing right behind you—to be paid off and memory-wiped so she’d never claim her real children."
My knees buckled.
May you like
Surrogate mother?
The room spun. All the blood rushed from my head. I stared at Julian in absolute horror as the puzzle pieces slammed violently into place.
