Chapter 6 - THE CLINIC CONSPIRACY
I stared at the glowing screen of my phone, my breath caught in my throat. The little girl in the photograph was breathtaking. She had my exact curl pattern, the same vibrant green eyes that had been in my family for generations. She was the ghost of the child I had prayed for, the biological daughter stolen from my womb by a monster in a designer dress.
I handed the phone to Brandon. His face drained of all color as he stared at the image of the daughter he never knew he had.
"She has her," I whispered, panic rising like bile in my throat. "Madeline has our biological daughter. She’s holding her hostage to get Luke. We have to call Detective Harris back."
"No!" Brandon hissed, grabbing my wrist. "Look at the background of the photo. That’s not a park. That’s the solarium at the Victoria Estate."
"The Victoria Estate?" I repeated, my mind racing. "You mean Victoria Sterling? Your mother’s best friend?"
Victoria Sterling was old Nashville royalty, a woman whose wealth rivaled the GDP of small island nations. She had always been cold, distant, and intensely private. She had struggled with infertility for years, a very public tragedy in their high-society circles, until she miraculously had a baby girl four years ago.
"My mother didn't just give our embryo away," Brandon said, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and absolute disgust. "She sold it. Or gifted it. She gave Victoria our child. Madeline knew Victoria was desperate, and Madeline needed favors, political connections, money... she traded our biological child for power in the social elite."
"Then who is Luke?" I asked, looking at my sweet boy who was now happily watching cartoons on the hospital television, completely unaware of the hurricane tearing our lives apart.
Brandon’s eyes darkened. "I think I know. Five years ago, my mother’s youngest sister, Aunt Clara, had a teenage daughter who got pregnant out of wedlock. It was a massive scandal. Madeline paid for the girl to go away to a 'boarding school' in Europe. The girl came back a year later, no longer pregnant, but she committed suicide shortly after. Madeline erased the whole event from the family history."
I gasped. "Luke is your cousin's baby. Madeline kept him in the family to manipulate the trust fund, but she hid his true parentage because he was born of scandal. She forced me to carry him so she could control the narrative."
We didn't have time to process the sheer magnitude of the evil we were dealing with. The clock was ticking. It was 9:00 PM. We had three hours until midnight. Three hours to save our biological daughter and protect our son.
"We are not taking Luke to the boathouse," I said fiercely. "I am not trading one of my children for another. We are going to the Victoria Estate. We are getting our daughter back ourselves."
Brandon nodded, a dark, dangerous resolve settling over his features. "Let's go. But we’re not going unarmed."
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We left Luke under the strict, heavily armed guard of Detective Harris’s trusted officers, claiming we needed to go home to pack some clothes. Instead, Brandon drove us to his private hunting cabin on the outskirts of town. He unlocked a heavy steel safe and pulled out a Glock 19 and a shotgun.
"My mother wants to play God," Brandon said, loading the magazines with cold, mechanical precision. "Tonight, she meets the devil."
