I came home after two years in Singapore and found my four-year-old son crawling on bruised knees while my husband’s mistress laughed and called him a little animal. / Chapter 48 / 80

Chapter 48 - The Traitor’s Price

My finger paused on the trigger. "What did you just say?"

"You think I left his survival to chance?" Lucian whispered, a sick, desperate grin tugging at the corner of his lips. "Why do you think Arthur Sterling kept him confined to that nursery? Why do you think he was crawling?"

"Arthur starved him! Arthur allowed Brooke to kick him!" I roared, pressing the barrel harder into his skull, my heart pounding with sudden dread.

"No, Clara. Look at the medical files you stole," Lucian breathed, his voice trembling under the cold steel of my gun. "Leo was born with a synthetic genetic anomaly engineered into our bloodline—the Castiglione mark. It ensures our heirs can never be stolen or raised outside the family. Every sixty months, the cellular sequence begins to collapse. His bruised knees weren't just from abuse—they were early-stage joint degradation! On his fifth birthday, without the stabilizing enzyme stored in our vault in Sicily, his vascular system will fail!"

The elevator chime rang.

Julian burst through the smoke behind me, his sidearm smoking, eyes darting between Lucian and me. "Clara! Hostile reinforcements approaching the rear service tunnel! We have sixty seconds before the perimeter is swarmed!"

My mind reeled. Was Lucian lying to save his own neck?

I remembered Leo’s constant complaints of leg pain before I took him to Singapore. I remembered the pediatricians in Geneva claiming it was just growing pains, yet the strange vitamin injections Arthur had insisted on administering every three months until I left. When I was in Singapore, Arthur had stopped the injections to punish me—which caused Leo's legs to give out, making it easy for Brooke to treat him like a crawling animal.

Arthur hadn't just been cruel—he had withheld the antidote to break the boy!

"Where is the enzyme?" I demanded, cocking the hammer of the gun. The metallic click echoed like a death knell in the cramped elevator.

"Palermo. Villa Castiglione," Lucian choked out, feeling the cold steel bite into his skin. "In the subterranean vault. Only my retinal scan can open it. Kill me, and your son dies in thirty-six hours!"