Chapter 4 - The Ultimate Betrayal
The sight of the gun sent a wave of primal terror straight through my veins.
Glen fell to his knees on the wet pool deck, raising his hands in absolute surrender.
"Richard, please, I can explain everything," Glen begged, crying like a coward.
Clara suddenly looked terrified, backing slowly toward the edge of the swimming pool.
"Explain to me why I paid for a child that doesn't belong to either of us," Richard barked.
He stepped closer to Glen, pressing the cold barrel of the gun against my husband's forehead.
I covered Ariel's eyes, praying she wouldn't witness her father being murdered.
"Clara couldn't get pregnant, even with my help," Glen sobbed hysterically.
"We tried for months, but her doctors said her body was rejecting everything."
Richard glanced at his wife, his eyes filled with venomous betrayal.
"So what did you do, Clara?" Richard demanded softly.
Clara began to cry, her perfect makeup running in dark streaks down her face.
"We needed to give you a baby to secure my inheritance," she whimpered.
"So when Maya went into the clinic for her IVF treatments, I paid the doctor to swap the samples."
The world began to spin wildly around me as the horrifying truth finally clicked into place.
I wasn't a surrogate for their twisted affair at all.
"Ariel is my biological child," I said aloud, my voice sounding like a ghost.
"Yes," Glen confessed, still kneeling on the ground.
"We used your egg and donor sperm, then planned to steal her from you later through a fake custody battle."
They had manipulated my body, my marriage, and my motherhood for pure greed.
Richard started laughing, a dark, booming sound that echoed against the brick walls.
"You two absolute fools actually paid for a stranger's sperm?" Richard chuckled.
He slowly lowered the gun from Glen's head.
"You didn't steal her from me," Glen suddenly yelled, his tone shifting rapidly.
Before anyone could react, Glen launched himself upward and tackled my father.
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The gun went off with a deafening crack, firing a bullet wildly into the sky.
"Run, Maya!" Glen screamed as he wrestled my father to the ground.
