Chapter 3
The journey from the hospital to the Vance family estate was a blur of tactical precision. Within an hour, a private medical transport had been arranged. Brooke sat in the back of an armored ambulance, holding her swaddled daughter, while a private neonatal nurse monitored her newborn son in the secured bassinet beside her.
Her son. The heir Garrett had desperately needed but failed to claim.
Marcus sat across from her in the dim light of the transport, watching the city streets roll past the tinted windows. "My legal team is already filing the birth certificates, Brooke. You requested sole custody based on immediate endangerment. We submitted the photos of Garrett’s public altercation with the hospital security."
"Did he fight them?" Brooke asked, her voice raspy from exhaustion.
"He screamed like a cornered rat," Marcus scoffed, a dark amusement in his eyes. "He realized exactly what you had done. He lost the element of surprise, and more importantly, he lost the narrative. The board members will not look kindly on a CEO who brings his mistress to his wife's delivery room."
"He still holds forty percent of the company," Brooke warned, looking down at her son’s tiny, sleeping face. "He won't just step down. He’s going to use Kendra’s child as leverage somehow. He’s going to claim I was the one who drove him away."
"Let him claim whatever he wants," Marcus said smoothly. "We are dealing in facts. The fact is, the boy is a Vance. The Hale bloodline ends with Garrett's illegitimate mistakes."
They arrived at the estate just as the sun began to dip below the horizon. The sprawling mansion was heavily fortified, surrounded by high stone walls and patrolled by armed security personnel. It was a beautiful, gilded cage, but tonight, it was the only place Brooke felt safe.
She was settled into a massive, luxurious suite on the second floor. The white bedding was crisp, the room smelling of fresh lavender. Two ornate cribs stood near the window, waiting for the twins.
Once the babies were asleep, Brooke sat on the edge of the bed, wearing a fresh silk robe. Marcus stood by the door, handing her an encrypted tablet.
"What is this?" Brooke asked.
"It's a digital backdoor," Marcus explained, his voice dropping low. "Before you married Garrett, you installed a tracking protocol on his personal servers. You thought he was embezzling. It turns out, he was."
May you like
Brooke opened the files. Her eyes widened as she scrolled through pages of offshore banking transfers. "He wasn't just funding Kendra's lifestyle. He was siphoning money from our charitable trusts to bribe local judges."
"Exactly," Marcus smiled coldly. "He bought the judiciary to ensure that if a divorce ever happened, he would win. But he didn't know we were watching. Tomorrow, we use this. We burn his empire to the ground."
