Chapter 58 - The Betrayal at Belle Meade
David’s roar of rage echoed across the water. Without waiting for Miller’s orders, we broke for David’s truck, tires screaming against the wet asphalt as we blew through the terminal gates and sped onto River Road.
I dialed our family estate in Belle Meade with shaking fingers. The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. Then the line clicked open.
"Mom? Mom, are you there?!" I screamed into the receiver.
A voice answered—smooth, cultured, terrifyingly calm. It was not our mother.
"Good evening, Sarah," Lord William Sterling said over the phone line. "The weather in Tennessee is remarkably pleasant for this hour. Your mother was gracious enough to offer me a cup of Earl Grey in your father's library."
"Don't you touch her!" David bellowed from the driver’s seat, slamming the gas pedal to the floor as the truck hurtled past eighty miles per hour down the winding residential boulevard. "If you lay a single finger on her, Sterling, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth!"
"Such passion," Lord William sighed, the clinking of fine porcelain audible through the speaker. "Just like your father, David. Always leading with his fists when his mind is utterly outmatched. I have no intention of harming Helen. She is, after all, family."
"She is not your family!" I yelled.
"Isn't she?" Lord William's tone shifted, turning razor-sharp. "Did your father never tell you why Eleanor was chosen for David? Why the wedding had to take place before David's thirty-fifth birthday? You searched through Silas Vance’s archives, but you never bothered to check the registry of marriages in Inverness, 1968."
The truck swerved violently as David fought to keep control of the wheel. My breath caught in my throat. Inverness? Our parents were married in Nashville in 1975. Our father had spent two years in Scotland during the late sixties on a logistics scholarship—a period of his life he had never spoken about.
May you like
"Ask your mother what is in the antique lockbox beneath your father's floorboards, Sarah," Lord William whispered, his voice intimate and lethal. "And then bring me the drive you stole from my courier. If you bring the FBI, your mother dies. If you fail to arrive in ten minutes... the secret of your brother's true parentage dies with her."
***
