Chapter 19 - The Matriarch's Return
Julian’s world fractured.
"Your mother is dead, Clara," Julian said, his voice trembling as the helicopter banked hard away from the burning mountainside. "Evelyn Sterling died ten years ago in a private plane crash over the Pacific."
Clara shook her head weakly, tears carving tracks through the dust on her hollow cheeks. "No... she faked it. Just like Marcus faked mine. She created The Caduceus Group, Julian. She wanted an heir with pure Sterling genetics... free from the Vance bloodline. Marcus was her hound. When Marcus failed to control you... she came back."
Julian pulled out his encrypted satellite phone, his fingers shaking as he dialed Vance Manor.
The line rang once. Twice. Three times.
Then, a click.
"Julian, darling," an aristocratic, chilled female voice spoke through the receiver. It was a voice Julian had not heard in a decade—the voice of Evelyn Sterling, Clara’s terrifying, megalomaniacal mother. "You always were so delightfully dramatic. Blowing up my clinic in Switzerland? Really? It took me three years to calibrate that surgical suite."
"If you lay a single finger on my son, Evelyn," Julian hissed, the veins in his neck bulging with lethal fury, "I will skin you alive. I will tear apart every asset, every trust, and every ally you have on this earth."
A cold, musical laugh echoed over the satellite link.
"Leo is sitting right beside me in the grand parlor, eating strawberries with chocolate cream," Evelyn said smoothly. "He is my grandson, Julian. He belongs to the Sterling bloodline. And so does the real baby girl Marcus delivered to me before you had him silenced in prison."
Julian felt the cabin of the helicopter spin around him. "The real baby...?"
"Did you really think I would leave Clara’s biological child in a clinic you were tracking?" Evelyn whispered, her voice dripping with venomous amusement. "Marcus was useful until the end. He swapped the baby at the New Jersey clinic two days before his arrest. The little girl you thought you saved with Chloe? A lovely decoy. Clara’s true daughter is in my nursery right now."
Through the phone, Julian heard Leo’s small, innocent voice in the background: *"Grandma? When is Daddy coming home? Who is this baby?"*
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"Daddy is coming home right now, Leo," Evelyn cooed into the background, before returning her voice to the receiver, cold as dry ice. "Come home, Julian. Come alone. If I see a single federal badge within five miles of Vance Manor... you will be burying two children in the crypt you so crudely dug up tonight."
***
