Chapter 18 - The Bloodline Secret
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The words hung in the cold, sterile air of the panic room.
"What?" I breathed out, my mind completely unable to process the sentence.
"Thirty years ago, during the warehouse war in Chicago," my father explained, his voice thick with guilt. "I cornered Victor Romanov. But he wasn't alone. His wife was there. She was pregnant."
I felt a sickening dread pool in my stomach.
"Victor used her as a human shield to escape the fire," my father continued, his voice shaking. "She was shot in the crossfire. As she was dying in the smoke, she went into labor. I stayed with her. I delivered you from the ashes of that warehouse."
He looked up at me, tears in his harsh, violent eyes.
"I couldn't leave a baby to die in the fire. And I couldn't let you be raised by a monster like Victor. So I took you. I raised you as my own. I kept you hidden in the corporate world, away from the mafia, praying he would never find out you survived."
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I stared at my hands. The blood running through my veins didn't belong to the man who raised me. It belonged to the monster who had sent Brandon to torture me.
"He doesn't want to kill you, Evelyn," my father said softly. "He wants you to take over the Romanov syndicate. He wants his heir back."
