Betrayed Broken Husband Becomes a Billionaire Daddy

1: Sixteen Years of Lies

Lucien Legion stared at the paper in his hand until the words stopped making sense and started making sense all over again.

NO BIOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIP.

Fifteen years. He had raised her for fifteen years and she wasn't his.

His hands shook on the steering wheel. The parking lot outside the lab blurred through the windshield like the whole world had been dunked in water.

He thought about Stacy. About the day they met at twenty four, about the wedding, about believing for sixteen straight years that he had built something real.

Stacy had come from money. An only child, spoiled rotten by a family that owned half of downtown. When Lucien Legion met her she was nobody, just another actress getting rejected at every audition in town. He was the one who paid rent. He was the one who told her she'd make it someday when nobody else believed her.

Then eight years ago a show blew up and suddenly she was the biggest name in the country. Magazine covers. Endorsement deals. A face nobody could scroll past.

And Lucien Legion had thought he was the luckiest man alive.

He laughed out loud in the empty car, a short broken sound. "Luckiest man alive," he said to nobody. "What a joke."

He drove until he saw a bar sign glowing red on the corner, and he pulled in without deciding to.

Inside, he dropped into a booth in the back and ordered whiskey. Then another. Then he stopped counting.

The bartender leaned over the counter, wiping a glass. "You want to slow down, buddy?"

"Nope." Lucien Legion's jaw was tight, his eyes glassy already. "Keep them coming."

Somewhere a speaker crackled and a country song started up, something about a cheating heart telling on you. Lucien Legion snorted and lifted his glass toward the ceiling like he was toasting the song itself.

"You hear that, Stacy? Even the jukebox knows."

He drank until the room started tilting sideways, until his own hands looked like they belonged to somebody else. By the time he tried to stand, his knees folded like wet cardboard and he had to grab the booth to keep from going down.

A voice, a woman's voice, came from somewhere close. "Sir, you can't drive like this. Let me help you."

Lucien Legion squinted at the blur in front of him. Long hair. A shoulder under his arm, holding him up.

His brain, soaked and furious, only had room for one name. "Stacy," he mumbled, voice thick and slurred. "There you are."

She didn't correct him. She just kept walking him toward the door, his weight dragging her sideways with every step.

Outside, cold air hit his face and for one second the world came into focus, sharp and cruel.

"Why," he said, stopping dead in the middle of the sidewalk, swaying. "Why'd you lie to me for sixteen years?"

No answer. Just her hands trying to pull him forward.

"You raised her like she was mine." His voice cracked and turned ugly in the same breath. "You let me hold her when she was a baby. You let me walk her to her first day of school. And the whole time you were laughing at me behind my back like I was some dog too dumb to notice the leash was fake."

He wasn't looking at her face. He wasn't looking at anything real.

"Say something," he snapped, grabbing her wrist harder than he meant to. "You've got a mouth on every red carpet in this country, so use it now. Who was he? Who'd you spread your legs for while I was working doubles to pay for this life you're living?"

Still nothing. She got the car door open and shoved him into the passenger seat, his head lolling against the window.

"Silent as a snake," he muttered, eyes falling shut. "That's what you are. A pretty little snake in a five thousand dollar dress."

The car started moving. Streetlights slid across his closed eyelids in orange streaks.

"I gave you everything," he said, quieter now, the anger folding into something rawer underneath it. "Fifteen years, and you made me a fool in front of my own daughter."

His head rolled to the side, chin dropping to his chest.

"Lies," he whispered. "It was all lies."

The car pulled into an underground garage, tires echoing off concrete. When it stopped, the woman came around and hauled him out by the arm, his full weight nearly dropping her to the ground before she caught her balance again.

Lucien Legion's eyes cracked open just enough to see gray concrete pillars and dim yellow lighting.

"Another one of your little hideouts," he slurred, laughing without any humor in it at all. "Bought with money I helped you make. Guess a rat always finds a new hole to hide in."

She didn't answer. She just kept dragging him toward the elevator, his boots scraping uselessly against the floor.

By the time the door of the apartment shut behind them, Lucien Legion couldn't feel his own legs anymore. He felt himself falling, felt carpet rise up to catch him, felt a body land half beside him, half under him, both of them too exhausted and too far gone to do anything but lie there.

The last thought that moved through Lucien Legion's mind before the darkness swallowed him whole was simple and absolute.

She wasn't Stacy.

And then there was nothing at all.