Chapter 8 - The Bombshell
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Cassandra shook her head violently, backing away until her spine hit a marble pillar.
"Adrian, don't do this," she pleaded, her voice cracking. "You don't understand what you're opening. You don't know the whole truth."
Adrian’s expression hardened into unforgiving stone. "Then explain it to me, Cassandra."
She looked around at the guests. Two hundred pairs of eyes stared back at her, judging, waiting. She looked at the locked mahogany doors guarded by men with concealed weapons. She looked at Elena, the poor maid who had accidentally unraveled a decades-old conspiracy.
And finally, she looked back at Adrian, the man who held her life in his hands.
Cassandra took a shaky breath, realizing she had absolutely no way out. If she lied now, the box in Elena's apartment would likely expose her anyway.
And what Cassandra said next made even Elena forget how to breathe.
"Your sister didn't disappear because of my father, Adrian," Cassandra whispered, her voice echoing in the dead-silent room.
Adrian said nothing. He didn't even blink. He just waited.
Cassandra's eyes filled with a dark, desperate panic as she delivered the final blow.
"She disappeared because of yours."
A collective gasp ripped through the ballroom.
Adrian’s imposing frame went rigid. "My father is the one who hired the investigators. He spent millions looking for her."
"He spent millions making sure she stayed hidden!" Cassandra cried out, tears finally spilling over her mascara. "Your father found out she was pregnant, Adrian! She was pregnant by a rival family's soldier. It was a disgrace. He ordered my father to handle it. He paid my father to take her to that maternity home and make sure she never came back to Chicago!"
Elena’s knees suddenly felt weak. She grabbed the edge of a cocktail table to steady herself. Pregnant.
"My father didn't kill her!" Cassandra sobbed defensively, trying to save her own skin. "He gave her a new name and a bus ticket! He let her live! But your father wanted her gone forever!"
Adrian stared at the woman he had almost married. The betrayal wasn't just from his best friend's family; it was from his own blood. The father he had idolized, the man whose empire he now ran, was the monster who had thrown Isabella away.
Adrian slowly turned his head to look at Elena.
The curvy maid with the dark eyes and the torn uniform. The woman who had been raised in poverty while her rightful family lived in palaces.
"Elena," Adrian said, his voice completely hollow.
"Yes?" she whispered.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-nine," she replied.
Adrian did the math in his head. The timeline fit perfectly. Isabella disappeared twenty-seven years ago. She was already pregnant. Elena was born shortly after.
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Adrian closed his eyes for a long, heavy moment. When he opened them, the cold mafia boss was gone. He looked at Elena not as a maid, but as blood.
"You aren't just wearing her locket," Adrian murmured, stepping toward her. "You are my niece."
