"I should go," Celia said, turning away from the door.Damon grabbed her arm gently. "Wait. Don't leave like this.""Let me go, Damon." Celia's voice shook."Not until you listen to me properly." Damon stepped outside and closed the door behind him, leaving Vivienne inside. "Look at me, Celia."Celia turned around. Tears were sliding down her cheeks. She remembered asking Damon to let them stay with Vivienne last night, but because he and Vivienne were dating, and Damon had been pretending they were just friends, he had only wanted an excuse to bring her to his house.“What do you want me to say?” Celia demanded. “That I’m fine with this? That I trust you completely, when I just found another woman wearing your shirt in your house first thing this morning?”“Vivienne isn’t another woman, Celia. She’s just my friend—the same woman you admire. You should know that Vivienne and I would never do something like that. So yes, I want you to trust me.”Damon moved closer. “Because nothing hap

"Vanessa Sterling?" Damon repeated the name, ensuring he had heard it correctly. "Vanessa is the one who asked you to falsify my DNA result?"Ms. Clarke nodded immediately. "Yes, she's the one. She asked me to make her own son Lucas seem like he was the true son of Sterling, but Lucas isn't. You are."Damon couldn't help the scoff that escaped his lips when he heard that. He glanced at Simon, who also had an unbelievable look on his face.“So Lucas isn’t even Edward Sterling’s biological son, just like I always suspected?” Damon leaned back in his chair. “He’s someone else’s child, and Vanessa paid you to switch our DNA results so I’d look like the fake one.”“Yes.” Ms. Clarke wiped her tears with shaking hands. “She came to me before the test was even scheduled. She knew Edward planned to do DNA tests on both you and Lucas because Vanessa told him your mother had cheated and that you weren’t his son. She also claimed Lucas was his because she and Edward had already started seeing eac

The next day, Damon and Simon pulled up to Margaret Ellison's apartment building in the older part of the city. The structure was modest, well-maintained but clearly decades old. They climbed three flights of stairs and stopped at apartment 3C.Damon knocked twice.The door opened to reveal a woman in her sixties, her graying hair pulled back into a bun. She wore a simple cardigan, and her kind eyes widened the moment she saw Damon’s face. There was no way she wouldn’t recognize him—he looked just like his mother. Others might have failed to notice, but she didn’t."Oh my god." Her hand flew to her mouth. "Damon?""Hello, Margaret."Tears filled her eyes immediately, and she pulled him into a tight hug before he could say anything else. "I heard they expelled you from the family, I tried to find you, tried to help, but I had no way to reach you."Damon felt unexpected emotion rise in his chest. "I know, it's okay."Margaret finally released him and noticed Simon standing behind Damon.

That evening, after dropping Celia off at her house, Damon returned home and immediately pulled out his phone. He dialed Simon's number and put the call on speaker as he walked into his study."Simon, what happened with Vanessa?""She took the bait completely. After hearing rumors about someone investigating Lucas's parentage, she became visibly agitated and paranoid. She left the Sterling mansion in a rush around three this afternoon."Damon sat down at his desk. "Where did she go?""A private storage facility on the outskirts of the city. My surveillance team followed her and observed her accessing a climate-controlled storage unit. She was inside for approximately twenty minutes before emerging with a locked metal box, which she then took back to the Sterling mansion.""Did you see what was inside the box?""No, we couldn't get close enough without risking detection. But the fact that she retrieved something from a secret storage location immediately after hearing the rumor suggest

Damon sat alone in his parked car beside the road. His hands rested on the steering wheel as he stared ahead without really seeing anything.Twenty years. Twenty years of carrying the weight of his mother's murder. Twenty years of knowing someone had taken her life and gotten away with it. Twenty years of being called a bastard and thrown out like trash.But now it was almost over. Soon Vanessa would pay for everything she had done. Soon his mother would finally get the justice she deserved.Damon closed his eyes and pictured his mother's face from the photographs Margaret had shown him. That warm smile, those kind eyes, she had been murdered simply because Vanessa wanted to steal her life and her husband. His mother had done nothing wrong. She had just been in the way of a monster's ambitions."I kept my promise Mom," Damon whispered to the empty car. "I'm going to make her pay for what she did to you."The thought brought him satisfaction deeper than anything he had felt in years. H