Chapter 10 - THE UNBROKEN TRUTHThe silence on the tarmac was suffocating. The rain beat down relentlessly against the metal body of the jet behind us.
I looked at Roman.
His face was completely motionless—a statue carved of grey marble. But he didn't lower the gun. He didn't deny it. He didn't look away from Julian’s eyes.
My heart felt as though it were being slowly crushed in a vise.
"Roman..." I whispered, my voice barely audible over the sound of the storm. "Is it true?"
Roman slowly lowered the pistol, holding it at his side. He didn't look at me. He kept his eyes fixed on Julian.
"Yes," Roman said softly.
The world shattered around me. The ground beneath my feet felt as though it were opening up into a dark, endless pit. Fourteen months of trusting this man... fourteen months of building a family with the feared billionaire of Chicago... all crumbling down around a terrible, blood-stained secret.
"You let her die?" I choked out, tears mixing with the cold rain on my cheeks.
Julian let out a dark, booming laugh. "You see, Pamela?! You traded one monster for another! He let my sister die so he could take full control of the Voss estate without a messy divorce! He is a murderer!"
Roman finally turned his head, looking down at me. His icy blue eyes were filled with an unbearable, devastating tragedy.
"Tell her the whole truth, Roman!" Julian taunted, waving the voice recorder in the air. "Tell her what Alessandra said before her heart stopped!"
"She didn't beg me to save her, Julian," Roman said, his voice quiet, calm, and utterly devoid of fear.
Julian frowned. "What?!"
"She didn't drink the poison by accident, and she didn't beg for an ambulance," Roman continued, taking a slow, heavy step toward Julian. "She drank the poison in front of me because I had just discovered the truth about the triplets."
I gasped, clutching my coat against my chest.
"I found the forged Canadian adoption papers in her safe in Milan three hours before she died," Roman revealed, his voice shaking with a deep, ancient grief. "I confronted her. I told her I was taking the babies back to Chicago to find their biological mother. I told her I was handing her and her father over to the federal prosecutors."
Julian’s smirk began to flicker. "You're lying..."
"Alessandra looked at me," Roman said, stepping even closer to Julian, ignoring the gun in his hand, "and she said: 'If I can't have them, no one will.' She drank the entire vial of potassium cyanide right in front of my eyes. Do you know why I didn't call the paramedics, Julian?"
Julian took a step back, his eyes widening in sudden, frantic terror.
"Because the cyanide worked in forty seconds," Roman whispered, his voice cold as the grave. "And her final words to me weren't a plea for help. Her final words were: 'Tell the waitress her babies died in the hospital.'"
I dropped to my knees on the wet tarmac, a ragged, agonized sob bursting from my chest.
She hadn't just stolen my children. She had died trying to ensure I would never, ever hold them again. She had chosen death over allowing a poor diner waitress to have her own blood back.
Roman dropped his gun onto the wet pavement. He knelt beside me in the pouring rain, wrapping his arms securely around my shaking frame, pulling me tight against his chest.
"I didn't kill her, Pamela," Roman wept into my hair—the feared Shadow King of Chicago weeping openly in the rain. "I let her go because she was a demon who wanted to destroy three innocent souls. I brought those babies back to Chicago because I promised myself I would search every hospital record in the country until I found the woman she stole them from."
I looked up into Roman’s face through my tears. The dark shadow that had hung over his eyes for years was finally gone, replaced by pure, raw, unadulterated truth.
He hadn't been her accomplice. He had been her executioner—protecting three tiny, silent infants from a family of monsters.
Julian stood frozen on the tarmac, staring at Roman and me, his hand holding the voice recorder trembling violently. The grand revenge he had spent three years planning had collapsed into the ugly, pathetic truth of his sister's madness.
Donovan stepped out from the Mercedes behind Julian, silently stepping up behind him, pressing a heavy hand onto Julian’s shoulder, wrenching the digital recorder and the journals from his grasp.
"Julian Vance," Donovan said coldly. "Interpol is waiting at the main terminal. You're going to join your father."
Julian didn't fight. He didn't speak. He allowed Donovan to drag him away into the gray Swiss rain, leaving the journals lying on the pavement.
Roman picked up the leather-bound book, holding it out to me.
"Do you want to keep it?" Roman asked softly.
May you like
I looked at the book that contained the madness of Alessandra Voss. I took it from his hands, walked over to the edge of the tarmac where a fuel incinerator was burning quietly near the maintenance hangar, and tossed the book straight into the roaring flames.
The leather curled, the pages blackened, and the final remnant of the nightmare turned to gray ash, rising into the stormy Swiss sky and disappearing forever.
