Chapter 5 - The Bloodline Secret
The abandoned warehouse at Pier 44 smelled of rotting fish and rusted metal.
Mara parked the catering van a block away, pulling her oversized coat tightly around her shivering body.
She stepped into the cavernous building, the sound of the freezing rain echoing loudly against the tin roof.
"Lily?" Mara called out into the darkness, her voice trembling with raw fear.
A single, blinding spotlight suddenly switched on in the center of the warehouse floor.
Bianca Thorne was standing there, holding a sleek, silver pistol with a silencer attached to the barrel.
There was no sign of Lily anywhere in the empty, desolate building.
"Where is my sister?" Mara demanded, forcing herself to step into the harsh circle of light.
Bianca laughed, a cold and terrifying sound that bounced off the concrete walls.
"Your pathetic sister is safe in her dormitory, completely oblivious to this entire drama," Bianca sneered.
Mara felt a crushing wave of relief wash over her, followed immediately by absolute dread.
She had abandoned Dante's protection and walked directly into Bianca's crosshairs for a lie.
"Why are you doing this, Bianca?" Mara pleaded. "If you wanted Preston, you can have him, I don't care about him."
"This has absolutely nothing to do with my idiot husband," Bianca spat, her perfectly manicured finger tightening on the trigger.
From the shadows behind Bianca, a tall, elegantly dressed man slowly walked into the light.
It was Senator Thorne, Bianca's father, looking at Mara with a gaze full of sickening recognition.
"You have your mother's eyes," the Senator said smoothly, taking a puff of a premium cigar.
Mara backed away, utterly confused as to why a powerful U.S. Senator was standing in a dirty warehouse in the middle of the night.
"I don't understand," Mara whispered, shaking her head.
The Senator sighed, pulling a folded legal document from the inner pocket of his tailored suit.
"Thirty years ago, before my political career began, I fell in love with a beautiful, penniless woman named Eleanor," the Senator explained.
Mara’s heart completely stopped in her chest.
Eleanor was the name carved into the gravestone Mara had been washing that very morning.
"She refused to have an abortion, so I paid her to disappear and pretend the child was someone else's," he continued coldly.
The realization hit Mara with the devastating force of a runaway freight train.
She was not just a lowly maid scrubbing floors in a rich woman's house.
She was the illegitimate, firstborn child of Senator Thorne, making her the true heir to a billion-dollar political dynasty.
"Bianca found the old birth certificates in my private safe last month," the Senator said, looking entirely bored by the revelation.
"If the press finds out I have a bastard child working as a maid, my presidential campaign is over."
Bianca raised the silver pistol, aiming it directly at Mara's pregnant stomach.
May you like
"Goodbye, big sister," Bianca smiled wickedly.
Before Bianca could pull the trigger, the entire front wall of the warehouse was violently blown apart by a military-grade explosive.
