Chapter 8 - The Betrayal
I stayed perfectly still under the metal desk while my aunt drank her expensive bourbon.
Aunt Lisa complained that pretending to be poor and checking on us every month was incredibly exhausting.
She told Alexander she wanted her ten million dollars wired to her offshore account immediately.
Alexander coldly replied that she would get her blood money after the surgery was successfully completed.
He warned her that if anything went wrong with Noah, she would be buried in the woods behind the estate.
Aunt Lisa nervously agreed and quickly left the room to wait in the guest wing.
Alexander followed closely behind her, securely locking the metal door from the outside.
I crawled out from under the desk, my heart pounding violently against my ribs.
I was completely trapped inside the secure surveillance room with no key and no windows.
I frantically searched the drawers again, desperately hoping to find a security keycard or a weapon.
In the very bottom drawer, hidden beneath a stack of blank papers, I found a heavy, black leather journal.
The initials on the cover belonged to my mother, Victoria Sterling.
I opened the dusty pages and found my mother's frantic, messy handwriting.
The journal documented her terrifying escape from her wealthy, abusive family twelve years ago.
But the final entry, dated exactly one year ago, completely shattered everything I thought I knew.
My mother wrote that she successfully broke into the Sterling corporate headquarters and stole their encrypted financial ledger.
She hid the digital ledger to use as ultimate blackmail against her father to keep us safe.
She also wrote a deeply buried confession about the night Noah was brought to our house.
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My mother stated clearly that she was physically incapable of having more children after I was born.
Noah was not my biological brother, and he was absolutely not her biological son.
