Chapter 3 - The Ghost of St. Augustine’s
The morning sun broke over the ocean in brilliant shades of amber and rose, casting long light beams through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Voss manor.
Elena hadn’t slept a wink. She had spent the entire night sitting on the plush carpet between the three cribs, her fingers intertwined with tiny hands whenever one of the triplets stirred. Surprisingly, none of them cried. Whenever Adrian or Luca began to whimper in their sleep, Elena would softly hum a lullaby her late mother used to sing to her. The moment the sound drifted through the room, the boys’ facial muscles relaxed, and they fell back into deep slumber.
At 7:00 AM sharp, a knock sounded on the nursery door.
Elena opened it to find a middle-aged man wearing a razor-sharp charcoal suit, carrying two leather briefcases, accompanied by Caden. The newcomer was tall, thin, and possessed eyes that seemed to analyze everything in milliseconds.
“Elena, this is Marcus Vance, my chief legal counsel,” Caden introduced. “Marcus, this is Elena Voss—sorry, Elena Page.”
The slip of the tongue hung in the air for a fraction of a second. Caden’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t acknowledge the mistake.
“Ms. Page,” Marcus said, offering a professional nod. “I’ve spent the last four hours reviewing the digitized back-ups Ortega managed to copy before the St. Augustine fire. The situation is far more sinister than a simple medical mix-up.”
They walked into the adjoining private sitting room. Caden gestured for Elena to take a seat on the leather sofa while Marcus opened his tablet, projecting several documents onto a flat screen on the wall.
“Fourteen months ago,” Marcus began, “St. Augustine’s Private Hospital was experiencing severe financial hemorrhaging. The chairman of the board, Lord Harrison Sterling—who, coincidentally, was your late wife’s uncle, Caden—was facing an indictment for mismanaging hospital endowment funds.”
Caden’s eyes narrowed into slits of ice. “Harrison.”
“Yes,” Marcus continued. “Harrison Sterling needed a massive influx of capital. At the same time, Caden, you had commissioned a surrogacy through an elite international agency. The contract was worth ten million dollars upon successful delivery of a healthy heir. However, the original surrogate hired in Switzerland had an undetected genetic condition and her pregnancy failed in the first trimester.”
Elena sat up straight, her heart pounding. “So they needed a replacement surrogate quickly without losing the ten-million-dollar contract?”
“Precisely,” Marcus said. “You had just applied for charity care at St. Augustine’s for your mother’s terminal chemotherapy treatments. You were vulnerable, desperately in debt, and possessed exceptional health markers. Dr. Vance—no relation—altered your medical intake paperwork. They told you that you were carrying donor embryos for a research-funded surrogacy program that would cover your mother’s medical bills.”
“They lied to me from the very start,” Elena whispered, her voice shaking with rage. “It wasn’t a research program. It was his children.”
“Not just his children,” Marcus clarified, pulling up a DNA comparison graph on the screen. “They didn't use an anonymous donor egg. To ensure the highest chance of implantation, Dr. Vance used your eggs and fertilised them with Caden’s sample. You aren’t just the carrier, Ms. Page. You are the 100% biological mother of these triplets.”
The confirmation hit Elena like a physical blow. She covered her mouth, tears spilling over her lashes. All those months of self-loathing, believing her body had failed her children, believing she was weak—it was all a manufactured lie. Her body hadn’t failed. It had birthed three healthy, beautiful children, who had been torn from her arms the moment they took their first breaths so a corrupt board chairman could claim a ten-million-dollar payout from Caden Voss.
“Why did they tell me they died?” Elena asked, her voice crackling with raw emotion.
“Because if you knew they lived, you would have demanded to see them,” Caden answered, his voice low and dangerous. He walked over to the window, staring out at the crash of waves against the cliffs. “A living surrogate demanding rights over the sole heirs to the Voss fortune would have triggered legal audits. Harrison couldn’t risk an audit. So he bought off the attending nurses, declared the infants dead on your chart, paid off the clinic, and presented the babies to me as the product of the Swiss surrogate.”
“And Dr. Vance’s plane crash eight months ago?” Elena asked, looking at Caden.
“Was no accident,” Caden said bluntly, turning around. “Harrison was cleaning up loose ends. And last night, when we pulled your files, he set fire to the hospital archives to burn the paper trail.”
“Then he knows,” Elena said, panic rising in her chest. “He knows I’m here. He knows I know!”
“Let him know,” Caden said, his tone dropping into a icy realm of absolute ruthless authority. “Harrison Sterling thinks he rules this city’s high society because of his old money. He forgets who built the infrastructure he walks on. He took my money, he manipulated my family, and he put the mother of my children through fourteen months of hell.”
Caden walked over to Elena, stopping directly in front of her. He extended a hand down to her.
“I am filing for an immediate protective order and an emergency revision of the children’s birth certificates. Your name will be legally placed on those documents by noon today.”
May you like
Elena looked at his hand, then up at his face. “And what happens to Harrison Sterling?”
“Harrison Sterling,” Caden replied, his gray-green eyes gleaming with ruthless promise, “is about to discover why men in this city don’t wake me up.”
