Chapter 3

The screen glowed in the dark room, a monument to my five years of foolishness. The perfect family. The loving father, the beautiful mother, the adorable child. A life I was never meant to be a part of.

I felt a wave of dizziness, my hand gripping the edge of the desk to steady myself. The sight of them together, so effortlessly happy, was a physical blow. It wasn't just a secret affair. It was a whole other life. A real one.

The clock on the screen read 3:17 AM. I didn't have much time. The grief, the rage, the humiliation-I pushed it all down. I had a job to do.

My fingers flew across the trackpad. I started searching.

It didn't take long. Cole was arrogant. He thought he was untouchable. He had folders hidden, but not hidden well enough from someone who finally knew what to look for.

A folder named "Projects" contained another one simply labeled "Home."

I clicked.

It was everything. Photos of Kiarra' s first steps. Videos of her first birthday party, with Juliette' s family there, laughing and celebrating. Holiday trips to Aspen, weekends in Napa. Every "business trip" Cole had ever taken, every "boys' weekend," was meticulously documented here. It was a digital scrapbook of the family he had built on the foundation of my life.

I found another folder named "The Nest." Inside were property deeds and utility bills for a house in a quiet, wealthy suburb across the bay. The name on the deed was Juliette's.

He hadn't just been visiting her. He had bought her a home. A beautiful, four-bedroom house with a backyard and a swing set.

My eyes burned, but I refused to cry. Tears were a luxury I could no longer afford.

Then I found it. The folder that would bring them all down.

It was labeled "Legacy."

Inside was a single, password-protected file for a trust fund. A very, very large trust fund. In Kiarra's name.

I didn't know the password for this one, but I didn't need it. The file preview showed the summary page. The funding source was a shell corporation I'd never heard of. But I recognized the transaction patterns. I' d seen them in the reports for my own non-profit. It was a method my father used for discreet philanthropic donations.

A quick search of the shell corporation' s name brought up public records. The director was listed as a lawyer I knew. He was my mother' s personal attorney. The funds were being funneled from a private Stewart family account. An account that required two signatures for any major withdrawal.

My father's and my mother's.

The blood drained from my face. My mother. Jessica. The one who fussed over my wedding dress, who cried tears of joy at my engagement party. She knew. She had been signing the checks. She had been funding her niece's secret life with my fiancé, all while smiling in my face.

My own mother had sold me out to protect the family name. And if she knew, my father, Gabriel, the master manipulator himself, had orchestrated the entire thing.

I wasn' t just a shield. I was a sacrifice. An offering laid on the altar of Stewart Dynamics to appease the world while they protected the real heir and her secret.

I clenched my fists, my nails digging into my palms. The pain was grounding.

I remembered Cole' s promise to his daughter on the tarmac. `Anything for you, princess.` He already had a child. He never intended to have a family with me. Our discussions about the future, about children, about the life we would build-it was all a script. A performance to keep the "charity case" in line.

I grabbed the portable hard drive I' d taken from my office. I plugged it into his laptop. The transfer began. Photos, videos, financial statements, deeds, trust fund documents. Everything.

This wasn't just evidence anymore. It was a weapon.

As the files were copying, a notification popped up in the corner of the screen. A new email in Cole's inbox.

From: Juliette Hughes

Subject: The Charity Case

My blood ran cold. I clicked it open.

It wasn' t just an email. It was a link to a video file stored in the cloud. It was the full, unedited recording of the video call I had received a snippet of earlier. I watched as Juliette laughed with Cole, her face alight with cruel amusement.

"Can you believe she's still planning the wedding?" Juliette said, swirling a glass of wine. "Picking out flowers and tasting cakes. It's almost sad. My sweet, naive charity case cousin, holding the fort while we live our real lives. She's playing house while I'm building an empire with you."

Cole's face was on the other end of the call, a smug smile on his lips. He didn't defend me. He just listened, soaking it in.

"Don't be too hard on her, J," he said, his voice dripping with condescension. "She's playing her part perfectly. And her part is almost over."

The transfer finished. A small notification confirmed that every single one of their secrets was now in my possession.

Juliette thought I was a naive charity case. Cole thought my part was almost over.

They had underestimated me. They had all underestimated me. They saw the gentle, philanthropic daughter and missed the steel underneath. The same intelligence, the same strategic mind they praised in Juliette, I had it too. They just never bothered to look.

Well, I was about to give them a performance they would never forget.

I safely ejected the hard drive, my fingers closing around it. It felt heavy, like a bomb.

I deleted the download history, cleared the cache, and covered my tracks with a precision that would have made our head of cybersecurity proud. I slipped out of the study and back into the cold, empty bed beside my fiancé.

I lay there in the darkness, the hard drive clutched in my hand.

The shareholders' meeting was in thirteen days.

The countdown had begun.