Chapter 3
I ordered every exit from the estate sealed.
Not because I feared Bianca would escape.
Because I no longer knew who might help her.
Evelyn drank slowly while Anna cleaned her hands. Ethan sat across from her with his wooden dinosaur in his lap, staring.
She stared back.
Neither knew what to do.
I understood.
Three years cannot be repaired because biology finally becomes known.
I turned toward Bianca.
“Start.”
She crossed her arms.
“There is nothing to start.”
Evelyn laughed bitterly.
Bianca looked at her.
“You should be grateful.”
That sentence almost made me move.
I didn’t.
“Grateful for what?”
Bianca answered Evelyn, not me.
“For Ethan being raised as a Castellano instead of whatever you would have turned him into.”
Evelyn flinched.
There it was.
Not denial.
Justification.
I stepped closer.
“You took her child.”
Bianca lifted her chin.
“I protected your heir.”
I stared at her.
Heir.
Not nephew.
Not boy.
Heir.
That word belonged to the older Castellano generation. My father used it. My uncles used it. Men who treated sons like future chairs and daughters like alliances.
I had spent years cutting that language out of my organization.
Apparently Bianca kept it alive inside the house.
Evelyn looked at me.
“She didn’t do this alone.”
That stopped me.
“Who?”
Bianca finally looked nervous again.
Evelyn continued.
“Your father.”
My father had been dead two years.
He died believing Evelyn abandoned me.
Or at least that was what I thought.
“No.”
Evelyn nodded.
“He knew I was pregnant before the wedding.”
I remembered.
She had planned to tell me something that morning. She kept smiling every time I asked why she looked nervous.
I thought it was the ceremony.
“He said if I married you while carrying the first Castellano grandson, I would own too much of you.”
My stomach tightened.
“That sounds like him.”
Evelyn nodded.
“He told Bianca the child belonged to the family before it belonged to me.”
I looked at my sister.
May you like
She did not deny it.
Three years ago, while I waited upstairs for my bride, my father and sister were apparently deciding whether she was allowed to become my wife at all.
