Emily dropped the manila folder onto the mahogany desk, her hands shaking as she pulled up a video file on her laptop.
“Vincent,” she breathed, her voice completely stripped of its usual calm authority. “We were wrong. We were so wrong about everything.”
Vincent didn’t look up immediately. For three years, his life had been an empty shell of brutal efficiency. The empire grew, but the Moretti mansion had remained deathly silent since the day Claire vanished. The divorce papers she left behind were still sitting unsigned in his top desk drawer.
“If this isn’t a lead on where she is, Emily, get out,” Vincent growled, his voice raspier than it used to be.
“It is a lead,” Emily said, shoving the laptop toward him. “And it’s a medical file from the day she disappeared.”
Vincent’s eyes locked onto the screen.
The security footage showed the hallway of Chicago Memorial Hospital from three years ago—the very afternoon Sophia had been admitted. But the camera angle wasn’t outside Sophia’s room. It was outside the OB-GYN department on the third floor.
The video played in crisp high-definition: Claire walking out of an examination room, holding an ultrasound photo, her eyes glowing with a soft, miraculous joy. She had been holding her stomach with both hands—a gesture Vincent had missed because he was too busy sitting at Sophia’s bedside.
“She was eight weeks pregnant, Vincent,” Emily whispered, tears finally spilling over her lashes. “The day she overheard us… she had just come from finding out she was carrying your heir.”
Vincent froze. The air rushed out of his lungs as if he had taken a physical blow to the chest.
“What did you just say?” he asked, his voice barely a rasp.
Emily opened the folder, spreading out the internal hospital audit logs her team had finally cracked. “She didn’t leave because she was broken, Vincent. She left because she realized her child would grow up in a house built on lies. She protected your baby from us.”
Vincent stood up so fast his leather chair crashed backward into the floor-to-ceiling windows. His mind reeled back through three years of agonizing regret—three years of realizing, far too late, that Sophia had merely been an illusion of his youth, while Claire had been the soul of his entire life. He had turned Sophia away months ago when her lies began to unravel, but the damage was already done.
He stared down at the ultrasound printout attached to the medical file. At the bottom, in the patient notes, the doctor had scribbled: Patient excited. Stated she was going to surprise her husband tonight.
A terrifying, beautiful realization washed over him. Somewhere out there, his wife was raising a three-year-old child—a child who had never known his name, his face, or his world.
“Where was the record accessed last?” Vincent demanded, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the edge of the desk, the terrifying darkness of the Moretti boss returning to his eyes with lethal focus.
“A clinic in Seattle,” Emily replied. “An insurance check cleared two hours ago under her mother’s maiden name.”
Vincent didn’t wait to hear another word. He reached into his coat, pulled out his phone, and dialed his head of security.
“Prep the jet,” Vincent ordered, his voice trembling with an overwhelming mix of fury, desperation, and love. “And bring every man we have. I’m going to bring my wife and my child home.”