Chapter 3: The True Heir
By 1:00 p.m., the engagement party was entirely dead, replaced by the clinical, unyielding gears of a criminal investigation.
Marcus called me from the pediatric intensive care unit. His voice was thick with emotion, but for the first time all morning, there was a thread of relief. "She’s awake, Chloe. They pumped her stomach and gave her a reversal agent. She’s asking for her rabbit."
I let out a sob, leaning against the police cruiser. "Thank God. Marcus, I'm so sorry—"
"Don't you dare apologize," Marcus interrupted, his tone instantly hardening. "The doctors found something else, Chloe. When they ran her blood panel to identify the sedative, they ran a routine genetic baseline for her medical file. The hospital database flagged a match."
"A match for what?"
"A match for a trust fund DNA registry," Marcus said, his voice dropping into a tense whisper. "Chloe, when your maternal grandfather passed away five years ago, he didn't leave his estate to your mother or Vanessa. He left the entire family trust—worth millions—to his first great-grandchild. But the trust had a stipulation: the child had to be raised without the financial interference of Raymond and Victoria."
The pieces of the puzzle slammed together with a terrifying impact.
My grandfather had loathed my parents' superficial, cruel nature.
He knew they had treated me like an outcast when I got pregnant at eighteen.
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He had bypassed them entirely, leaving his fortune to Lily.
If Lily was out of the picture—or if I was proven to be an unfit, negligent mother due to a "tragic accident"—the custody of Lily, and control of the multi-million-dollar trust fund, would automatically revert to her legal guardians. And according to a document my mother had tried to force me to sign a month prior under the guise of "insurance paperwork," those guardians would be Raymond and Victoria.
