Chapter 1 - The Blood TestThe digital clock on the bedside table read 11:48 p.m. The silence of the penthouse felt heavier now, weighted by the voice of Dr. Whitfield crackling through the phone.
"Julian? Are you still there?"
Julian swallowed, his throat dry as bone. "I'm here, Thomas. Tell me."
"The hospital has a direct pipeline for your urgent courier accounts, as you know," the doctor began, his voice measured, clinical, yet laced with an undeniable tremor of shock. "When your office dropped off the matching DNA samples four hours ago—the hair from the hairbrush you managed to retrieve from Isabel Vega’s apartment building, and your own registry swab—we pushed it straight to the top of the automated sequence queue."
Julian’s grip on the phone tightened until his knuckles turned white. "And?"
"The probability of paternity is 99.999%," Dr. Whitfield said softly. "Julian... he is your son."
The room seemed to spin. The glittering skyline of Manhattan outside the floor-to-ceiling windows blurred into streaks of neon. Six years of calculated detachment, of throwing himself into mergers, acquisitions, and cold steel empires, shattered in a single second. He had a son. Mateo Vega. A five-year-old boy with his gray eyes who had giggled as Rex licked his sticky fingers.
"Julian? What are your next steps? Because Isabel Vega is no ordinary woman. She has filed for permanent residency protection under a sealed educational grant, and if she catches wind that you're moving in on custody without warning—"
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"She won't have to worry about warnings," Julian cut in, his voice dropping an octave into the cold, ruthless tone that terrified boardrooms across the globe. "Prepare the legal team. By sunrise, I want full visibility on every asset, address, and movement of Isabel and Mateo Vega. They aren't leaving this city."
He hung up before the doctor could reply. He walked over to the dark window, looking down at the city where his bloodline was currently sleeping, completely unaware that the predator had just caught the scent.
