Next morning I was having coffee on the Montenegro estate’s south garden, sitting under the morning sun with no makeup, no guards close enough to bother me, and no need to pretend I was weak anymore. Elle was a few meters away, playing near the hedges with a doll in each hand, surrounded by quiet shadows that followed her everywhere. I could hear her giggle and talk to herself while the security watched her like she was royalty and in truth, she was.
I lifted my cup slowly and stared ahead at the quiet hills, but my mind wasn’t on the trees or the breeze or the taste of coffee. It was on his face. The exact moment Niccolo Salvacion realized
who I was.
He looked like he’d seen a ghost with a blade pressed to his neck. Pale, still, stunned. Even Luca couldn’t hide the crack in his expression. And when they both stood and left the room like cowards with tails between their legs, I didn’t stop them. I let them run. Let them walk out like scared little birds pretending they still held power over a storm.
Michael walked across the grass and sat beside me without a word, like he always did. Calm and cold. He handed me a flash drive.
“He’ll wake up to the kind of truth that ruins men, sister,” he said, tone like stone.
I nodded and took it.
Before noon hit, the contents of that flash drive were delivered straight to Niccolo’s private suite at the hotel by one of our black–suited Montenegro’s couriers. No return address. No warning. Just truth, delivered like a knife in silk.
The video started with the doctor, sweating, voice shaking, confessing under surveillance.
“Margot paid me to fake the DNA,” he said. “She gave me instructions. Money first, then threats I didn’t know what to do. I thought if I didn’t lie, I’d lose everything.”
He looked down, broken, and said the words I knew would cut deepest.
“Eli Salvacion was your biological son. He matched you. Full blood.”
Then the video cut to my voice.
“He died believing he was never yours. How does that taste, Niccolo?”
I didn’t need to ask twice.
Because I was watching. On the security feed we hacked into the hotel’s top floor, I saw his face the second he watched it. I watched how his lips parted but no sound came. How his eyes moved like they were trying to escape the screen. How his hand shook but didn’t reach for anything. He sat there, staring at the screen like it was a grave.
I didn’t smile
just whispered to no one, “I want him to break where no one can see. Because that’s where it hurts the longest.”
Niko sat beside me again, now with a file on his lap, scanning the feed from a second camera.
“He might retaliate,” he said without emotion.
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I sipped my coffee and answered, “Let him. I control his air now.”
After that, I sent one last thing to his room–a second envelope, no threats this time, no bloodstained threats or veiled warnings. Just Eli’s real birth certificate, stamped and signed by international medical courts under Montenegro jurisdiction.
Inside it was Eli’s last drawing, scanned and printed. Crayons, crooked lines, soft colors. Fou stick figures. A woman with long hair. A man in a dark shirt. A girl with a sun on her head. And a boy with a red balloon.
He wrote under it in shaky handwriting: “Papa and Mama and Elle and Eli. Forever.”
And I attached my own note under that.
“You erased him from the world. But I made sure he lives forever in mine.”
Then I turned off the screen and stood from the chair. There was nothing left to show him.
Only what he would feel. Alone. In silence. Forever.
NICCOLO’S POV
My whole fucking world collapsed the second I saw that video. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move Couldn’t even curse loud enough to silence what the truth did to my head. Eli. That boy. That small fucking boy–he was mine. My blood. My son. And I let him die thinking he wasn’t. I killec my own goddamn kid with my hands.
I threw the table in the suite, flipped the chair, smashed the bottle against the mirror anc screamed like a dog that lost its pack. Geneva’s voice haunted me from the video. Her words didn’t come like revenge…they came like a funeral bell I should’ve heard long ago. That womar begged me once to believe her and I spat on her name. Now I can’t even bury our son with my own hands because I burned every fucking bridge to her.
I rushed out. Took the jet back to Europe. Stormed into the estate where Margot was supposec to be. The guards scrambled. The maids stuttered. I growled at them, “Where the fuck is Margot?”
‘She… she hasn’t returned, sir,” one of them said with her head down.
called her. Once. Twice. Ten fucking times.
No answer.
snapped the phone in half and turned to Luca, who was already waiting by the car.
‘Bring Margot to me. I don’t care how. I don’t care where. Dead or breathing, just drag her to my fucking feet.”
He nodded and vanished.
But that wasn’t enough. I needed a drink.
needed to bleed without slicing skin, so I drove to my private bar in the undercity. That place was off–grid. Mine. Where the air stinks of sweat and sins and no one dares breathe if I don’t let them.
I walked in without a word. Took the far VIP corner. Lit a cigarette. Ordered bourbon straight. And
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when it came, I didn’t even look at the server. I just downed it, then poured another.
I sat there, half–dead, fingers shaking, lips pressed together like I was swallowing glass.
Then the door opened.
Three bastards walked in. Loud. Laughing. Didn’t give a shit whose bar they entered. I didn’t ever look until I heard the voice. One of them was familiar. Too familiar.
I shifted slightly and stared through the dim lights.
The doctor.
The same fucker who treated Margot and her puppet parents. The one she called in for he fake–ass hospital breakdowns. The one who said her womb was weak. The one I trusted with medical facts while my life burned.
They sat a few tables away, clinking beer bottles.
I lit another cigarette. Stayed quiet. My drink untouched now.
Then he laughed. That kind of loose, drunk, shameless laugh that only liars have.
“Man, that Ms. Jenner is insane but rich as hell,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Paid me sever figures just to fake her parents‘ burns.”
Chapter 20
