“You are a suspect in an attempted murder,” Julian said, turning his head slowly toward her. His eyes were devoid of any warmth, any memory of the woman he had shared his bed with for the past eight months. “Touch those doors, Bianca, and Marcus will break both your wrists before you clear the foyer.”
Bianca froze, her face morphing from false victimhood into a sneer of pure, venomous hatred. “You think you’re invincible, Julian? You think you own this city? Check the markets at midnight. You’re already ruined.”
A sudden commotion at the dais broke the standoff. The private medical team had arrived, rolling a stretcher across the marble floor. Evelyn was lifted onto the gurney, an oxygen mask strapped over her pale face. As they wheeled her past Julian, her frail, paper-thin hand reached out, catching his sleeve.
Julian bent down immediately, his ear inches from her mask.
“The study… Julian,” Evelyn wheezed, her chest rattling with shallow, painful breaths. “The hidden floorboard beneath your father’s desk… The Blue Box contains Clara’s true autopsy. Bianca didn’t just target me. She… she was there three years ago…”
Julian’s breath caught in his throat.
*Clara.*
His late wife. Chloe’s mother. The woman who had supposedly died in a tragic single-car accident on a rain-slicked highway three years ago—an accident that had nearly shattered Julian’s sanity and driven him to the brink of suicide.
Before Julian could demand another word, the paramedics rushed Evelyn through the terrace exits, the sirens of the ambulance wailing into the cold Manhattan night.
Julian stood upright. The room seemed to warp around him. The pieces of an unimaginable puzzle were violently colliding in his mind. Bianca hadn’t entered his life by coincidence eight months ago at an art gallery in Paris. This wasn’t an opportunistic gold digger looking for a multi-million-dollar divorce settlement.
This was an orchestrated execution of the Vance lineage.
Julian turned slowly to look at Chloe, who stood under the protective arm of Marcus Vance. The little girl was trembling, but her dark eyes—so eerily identical to her late mother’s—were fixed entirely on Camille.
“Chloe,” Julian said gently, kneeling before his daughter. “Where did Grandma give you that note?”
Chloe swallowed hard, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her blue dress. “Grandma was hiding in the library before the party started, Daddy. She was crying. She said Auntie Camille gave Bianca a syringe in the hallway. She told me… if anything happened to her, I had to run to you and tell you that the monster in our house killed Mommy too.”
The silence that fell over the ballroom was absolute.
Across the room, Camille let out a choked gasp, dropped her champagne glass—which shattered in a spray of foam against her designer shoes—and bolted for the service corridor.
“Catch her!” Marcus roared, already signaling his tactical unit.
Julian did not run. The fury inside him had evolved into an icy, surgical clarity. He took Chloe’s small hand in his. “Marcus, take Chloe to the safe room at the penthouse. Lock it down with Level-1 protocol. No one enters unless I personally give the retinal scan. Do you understand?”
“With my life, Mr. Vance,” Marcus replied solemnly. He scooped the little girl into his arms. Chloe buried her face in the security chief’s shoulder, her small frame shivering with exhaustion.
Julian turned toward the remaining guests, his voice projecting through the cavernous hall like a crack of thunder. “The gala is over. My security team will escort you out one by one. Anyone who leaks a single frame of this footage before dawn will face the entire legal department of Vance Enterprises. We will dismantle your finances until you don’t have enough to buy a cup of coffee. Clear the room.”
Within ten minutes, the grand ballroom was an empty graveyard of broken crystal, spilled wine, and shattered vanity. Only Bianca remained, flanked by two private guards, standing by the ruined dais. She had dropped all pretenses. She sat on the edge of the gilded banquet table, swinging one leg, casually inspecting her manicure.
“You’re pathetic, Julian,” Bianca scoffed, her voice dripping with venom. “You think you’re a king, but you’re just a blind, arrogant fool. Your mother was already dying. I just sped up the process.”
Julian walked toward her, his footsteps echoing in the cavernous silence. He stopped three feet away, his shadow towering over her.
“What did you give her, Bianca?”
Bianca laughed—a sharp, grating sound that bounced off the marble walls. “Ask your sister. She’s the one who bought it on the dark web. High-dose digitalis. Triggers a natural-looking myocardial infarction in patients with recent heart surgery. The coroner wouldn’t have even raised an eyebrow. An elderly woman gets too excited at her son’s gala and drops dead. Tragic. Predictable.”
