Chapter 6 - The President’s Daughter
Damian moved so quickly that security stepped between him and Arthur.
“You knew her?”
Arthur did not answer.
Damian shouted.
“You knew Evelyn’s mother?”
Arthur looked twenty years older.
“Yes.”
A wave of voices exploded through the room.
Journalists started calling newsrooms.
Politicians demanded that the barriers be opened.
My father raised one hand.
“No communication leaves this estate until law enforcement arrives.”
A reporter shouted.
“You can’t suppress this.”
“I’m preserving an active crime scene.”
He pointed toward the screens.
“And possibly protecting witnesses whose names are about to become public.”
That quieted some of them.
Not me.
I looked at Arthur.
“Tell me about Catherine.”
Arthur stared at the floor.
“She was twenty-four.”
“Pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
“Who was my father?”
Arthur looked toward Jonathan.
Jonathan looked back.
Something passed between them.
I saw it.
“No.”
I stepped closer.
“Do not do this.”
Arthur whispered,
“Your biological father was Michael Cross.”
Damian’s head snapped around.
“My uncle?”
Arthur nodded.
Michael Cross.
Arthur’s older brother.
The man who died in a boating accident twenty-four years earlier.
My stomach twisted.
That made Damian my cousin.
Damian looked equally horrified.
“You’re saying she’s family?”
Arthur nodded.
Damian took another step backward.
For the first time since he assaulted me, he looked genuinely sick.
I almost laughed at the cruelty of it.
He had spent weeks stalking me at events.
Sending flowers.
Threatening men who spoke to me.
Then tonight, after I rejected him in front of his friends, he attacked me.
And he had never known we shared blood.
Arthur looked at me.
“Michael loved Catherine.”
“Then why was she imprisoned?”
“Because President Rowan discovered the relationship.”
Rebecca interrupted.
“That is not why.”
Arthur looked furious.
“You weren’t there.”
“I was in the next room.”
Her words froze him.
Rebecca continued.
“President Rowan knew about Michael.”
“He didn’t care.”
“What terrified him was the child.”
Me.
“Why?”
Rebecca opened another file.
A genetic report.
My eyes moved over language I barely understood.
Then I saw the date.
It had been performed before I was born.
My father stared at the screen.
“That wasn’t in the archive I found.”
Rebecca nodded.
“Because Elizabeth removed it.”
I looked at him.
“Mom had this?”
He said nothing.
I turned toward Rebecca.
“What is it?”
“It isn’t about disease.”
“Then what?”
She inhaled slowly.
“Catherine Rowan was not President Rowan’s biological daughter.”
The room stirred.
Rebecca continued.
“She had been adopted secretly.”
I frowned.
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Everything.”
She placed another document beside the first.
The records connected Catherine to a family I recognized instantly.
The Whitmore family.
Old money.
Banking.
Oil.
Defense.
A private fortune estimated in the tens of billions.
Rebecca spoke softly.
“Catherine was the biological daughter of Charles Whitmore.”
A guest near the front collapsed into a chair.
I stared at the screen.
Charles Whitmore had died without acknowledged children.
His estate had been divided among distant relatives and foundations.
Billions of dollars.
Land.
Defense patents.
Trusts.
Voting shares.
Arthur whispered,
“If Catherine had a living child…”
I finished it.
“That child would have inherited everything.”
Rebecca nodded.
“And powerful people needed everyone to believe that child never existed.”
I swallowed.
“So Orpheus wasn’t only selling children.”
“No.”
She stared straight into the camera.
“It was also making inconvenient children disappear.”
Before anyone could respond, the lights went out.
May you like
Total darkness swallowed the ballroom.
Then a single gunshot cracked from somewhere above us.
