I walked into my boyfriend’s family barbecue twenty-seven weeks pregnant / Chapter 43 / 63

Chapter 43 - The Phantom Heir

My breath caught in my throat, freezing the air inside my lungs.

Denise was supposed to be in a federal isolation cell forty miles away. I had watched her weep behind the acrylic glass this very morning.

"Surprised, Clara?" Denise said, her voice dripping with the poisonous, aristocratic arrogance that had terrorized Tyler for thirty years. "Did you really think the prison transport system in this county couldn't be bought for a mere two million dollars?"

"You two were working together the whole time," Tyler said, his hands remaining still at his sides, though I could see the muscles in his neck tensing like coiled steel. "The prison visit. The hysterical breakdown. The confession about my mother. It was all theater."

"Not all of it," Thomas corrected, stepping up beside Denise. The two enemies—the disgraced matriarch and the resurrected brother—stood shoulder to shoulder like ancient gargoyles overlooking their kingdom. "Denise did murder your mother, Tyler. That part was delightfully true. But she didn't do it out of jealousy."

Denise smiled, a hideous, triumphant grin that sent an icy dread plunging into my stomach. "I did it because your mother found out the real truth about your birth, Tyler. A truth that Julian died trying to erase from the earth."

"What are you talking about?" Tyler demanded.

Thomas reached into his coat and pulled out an ancient, yellowed birth registry certificate bearing the seal of the Swiss Confederation, dated March 14, 1994.

"Julian was sterile, Tyler," Thomas said softly, his voice echoing through the damp, cold warehouse like a funeral bell. "He contracted mumps in a boarding school in Geneva when he was sixteen. He could never father a child. Not with Denise. Not with the French waitress. Not with anyone."

Tyler’s eyes widened, a look of unadulterated shock crossing his features for the first time in his life. "That's a lie. The genetic test on the vault confirmed my consanguinity at 99.8%!"

"It confirmed you were a *Vanderberg*," Thomas whispered, his smile turning feral and horrifyingly intimate. "Because Julian didn't father you, my boy."

Thomas took a single step closer, the swaying halogen lights casting a deep shadow over the silver scar across his cheek.

"I did."

Before Tyler could process the revelation, Thomas pulled a digital transceiver from his pocket and pressed a red toggle switch.

Across the harbor, five miles away on the dark coastal bluff, a blinding fireball erupted into the night sky, illuminating the distant clouds in a violent, apocalyptic bloom of orange and red—directly over the coordinate where the safehouse bunker stood.

At that exact second, Tyler's phone buzzed in his pocket with an incoming satellite text alert:

*PERIMETER BREACH AT BUNKER. MAEVE IS—*

The message cut off into static.