Chapter 33 - The Geneva Infiltration
The revelation was a slap of raw fire across my soul. Julian wasn't just a narcissistic cheat who deserted me after thirty-one hours in labor to sunbathe on a yacht with a blonde heiress. He had been an asset recruited by Aethelgard to impregnate Arthur Vance’s sole heir and extract the resulting offspring.
"Julian never left for that yacht in Cabo just to cheat," I said, my voice dead and lethal. "The mistress, Victoria... who is she really?"
Dominic rapidly ran facial recognition through Interpol’s gray-market registry. Within ninety seconds, Victoria Sterling's actual identity flashed onto the terminal.
"Victoria von Berg," Dominic read. "Daughter of Baron Heinrich von Berg, Chairman of the Executive Council at Aethelgard. She wasn't Julian's sidepiece, Clara. She was his handler."
"And when I caught Julian and exposed his financial fraud," I continued, pacing the concrete floor, "Julian panicked. He lost control of the extraction timeline. That's why he broke into the nursery back at the penthouse. He wasn't trying to ransom Noah to pay his debts. He was trying to hand Noah over to Victoria to save his own miserable skin."
"They're moving assets into New York right now," Dominic warned, pointing to an encrypted satellite sweep of private aviation logs. "A Gulfstream belonging to the Von Berg holding company landed at Teterboro forty minutes ago. Heinrich von Berg is on that plane."
"Let them land," I snarled, turning to face him. The frantic fear that had paralyzed me at the hospital was completely gone, replaced by a cold, predatory clarity. "They think I’m an emotionally shattered heiress running scared with a newborn. They think my father was a coward who died hiding his secrets."
"What are you planning?" Margaret asked, sensing the shift in my posture.
"My father didn't just leave behind a video warning," I said, walking over to the safe behind the server rack. I entered the sequence my father had taught me as a chess puzzle when I was twelve years old: *Queen to Rook Seven, checkmate.*
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The steel door hissed open. Inside lay not stacks of cash, but three black leather-bound ledgers containing Swiss bank account numbers, corporate voting proxies for forty-two percent of Aethelgard's holding companies, and digital keys to offshore shell accounts that controlled their European manufacturing lines.
"My father knew they would come for his grandchild," I whispered, holding the master ledgers in my hands. "He didn't just hide the enzyme. He set a trap to bankrupt every single monster who funded it."
