Chapter 3 - The Cold Truth
Three hours felt like three lifetimes.
While Damian was downstairs in his laboratory, I remained in the nursery. The guards stayed outside the closed door, but they didn't interfere as I fed the triplets, changed their clothes, and rocked them to sleep one by one. It was a surreal nightmare wrapped in a beautiful dream. Every time Mateo sighed in his sleep or Clara reached out her tiny hand to touch my apron, my heart swelled—and then shattered all over again at the thought of what had been stolen from us.
Fourteen months of first smiles, first laughs, first steps... gone. Erased by a signatures on a piece of paper.
The nursery door creaked open.
Damian walked in. He had removed his suit jacket, rolling the sleeves of his crisp white shirt up to his elbows. In his left hand, he held a single sheet of printed paper. His face was completely devoid of color, as pale as marble.
I stood up slowly from the rocking chair, holding my breath. "Damian?"
He didn't speak right away. He walked over to the central crib where Clara lay sleeping, looking down at her small, innocent face. Then, slowly, he turned the paper toward me.
At the bottom of the page, highlighted in dark red text, were the results:
PROBABILITY OF MATERNITY: 99.999%
My knees buckled. I caught myself on the edge of the changing table, tears spilling freely down my face. "They're mine... oh God, they're really mine..."
Damian sank into the heavy armchair opposite me, resting his head in his hands. A raw, ragged breath escaped him. The feared boss of the Marchetti syndicate looked entirely undone.
"My wife... Helena," Damian said, his voice hollow. "She didn't die in childbirth. I knew her health was failing, but Dr. Vance told me three days before the birth that a surrogate had been secured to carry our embryos because Helena’s heart couldn't take the strain. I paid Vance five million dollars to manage the process privately."
I gasped, realization slamming into me like a freight train. "Dr. Vance didn't just steal my babies... he sold them to you!"
"He didn't just sell them," Damian corrected, his voice dropping into a deadly register as he looked up. His eyes were no longer those of a confused father; they were the eyes of 'The Saint'—the ruthless lord of the city's underworld. "He found a healthy young woman with no powerful family to defend her, faked a medical crisis, declared her infants dead, and delivered them to me as the 'surrogate's children' to claim my money."
He stood up, walking toward me with slow, deliberate steps.
"He played us both, Noelle. He used your grief to enrich himself, and he used my desperation for a family to make me an unwitting accomplice in the theft of your children."
I grabbed Damian’s forearm, my fingers digging into the expensive fabric of his shirt. "What are we going to do? I want my babies back, Damian! I can't lose them again!"
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Damian looked down at my hand on his arm, then up at my terrified face.
"You aren't going to lose them," Damian declared softly, placing his large palm over mine. "And you aren't leaving this house. From this moment on, you are under my absolute protection. Tomorrow, Dr. Vance will learn what happens when you cross the Marchetti family."
