My Wife Treated Me Like a Servant, Now I’m a Billionaire

Chapter 4: Not His Blood

Victoria walked him to the elevator, her heels clicking in rhythm with every word.

"The first batch of funds should clear within five days." She pressed the down button and turned to face him. "But there's one thing you'll need to handle personally. The initial Bitcoin cash out requires your authorization on site. You'll need to fly to the Caymans before we can move anything."

"How soon?"

"Within the week, ideally. The shell company will be registered by Wednesday. After that, it's just your signature and a biometric confirmation at the offshore bank." She folded her arms and looked at him with that sharp, calculating stare. "Can you make the trip without raising suspicion?"

"Nobody's watching me, Ms. Sloane." Caleb stepped into the elevator. "Nobody's been watching me for a long time."

"Good. Keep it that way." Victoria held the door with one hand. "I'll have my assistant send you the flight details tonight. And Mr. Hayes? Don't use your main phone for any of our communications. Buy a prepaid one. Cash only."

"Already planning on it."

The elevator doors closed, and Caleb leaned against the back wall, staring at his reflection in the polished steel. The face looking back at him was the same face that had stared out from behind a mop handle and a delivery truck steering wheel for six years. But something behind the eyes was different now. Something was awake.

He drove twenty minutes across town to a narrow brick building on Alcott Street. No sign on the door. No name on the window. Just a buzzer and a small camera mounted above the frame. Owen had told him the place looked like nothing from the outside, and he was right.

He pressed the buzzer.

"Name and referral?" A voice crackled through the speaker.

"Caleb Hayes. Owen Park sent me."

The door clicked open.

The office inside was small, plain, and smelled like old coffee. A man in his mid forties sat behind a cluttered desk, his sleeves rolled up and a pen tucked behind his ear. He stood up when Caleb walked in and extended a hand.

"Greg Dunbar. Owen called ahead." His grip was firm, his eyes the kind that had spent decades reading people who didn't want to be read. "Sit down. Tell me what you need."

Caleb sat. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his jacket and slid it across the desk.

"Two people. I need everything you can dig up on both of them."

Greg unfolded the paper and scanned it. "First one?"

"A man named Brandon. I don't have his last name yet, but I've got his license plate number. Black sedan, late model, high end." Caleb pointed to the string of letters and numbers he had memorized from the school parking lot. "I need his full identity, his background, where he works, where he lives, and how long he's been in contact with my wife."

"And the second?"

"My wife. Natalie Hayes." Caleb's jaw tightened. "Full name, date of birth, social security number, everything is on that sheet. I need her phone records, her financials, and any evidence of an extramarital relationship. Photos, messages, hotel bookings, whatever you can find."

Greg looked at him for a moment, then leaned back in his chair. "Owen told me you were going through a divorce."

"I was. Not anymore."

"Hmm." Greg picked up the paper and read it again. "This is pretty standard work. I can have preliminary findings on the plate within twenty four hours. The deeper dig on your wife will take three to five days, depending on how careful she's been."

"She hasn't been careful at all." Caleb's voice was flat. "She thinks I'm too tired and too stupid to notice anything."

"Those are always the easiest ones." Greg opened a drawer and pulled out a contract. "My rates are on page two. Owen's referral gets you a fifteen percent discount. I'll need half upfront."

Caleb signed without reading the rates. Money was no longer a problem. Money would never be a problem again.

He left the agency and got back in his car. It was 1:47 in the afternoon. He sat in the driver's seat with the engine off, staring through the windshield at nothing, letting the silence fill the car like water filling a bathtub.

Then his phone buzzed.

A notification from the forensic testing center. Results ready. He had paid for the rush service, and they had delivered.

His thumb hovered over the notification for three seconds. Part of him, the old part, the part that still remembered holding a newborn baby boy in a hospital room five years ago, wanted to close the phone and throw it out the window. 

Because as long as he did not open that message, there was still a chance. Still a sliver of hope that he was wrong.

He opened it.

The report loaded in two seconds. His eyes went straight to the bottom line, past the charts and the technical language and the sample identifiers, straight to the only words that mattered.

Probability of paternity: 0%.

The subject tested is excluded as the biological father of the child.

Caleb's hands started shaking. Not the subtle trembling from two days ago when he found the Bitcoin wallet. This was different. This was his whole body, from his fingers to his shoulders, vibrating like something inside him had cracked and everything was leaking out.

He remembered the hospital. He remembered Natalie squeezing his hand so hard during labor that she left bruises on his knuckles. He remembered the nurse placing that tiny, screaming, red faced baby into his arms and saying, "Congratulations, Dad." 

He remembered crying. He remembered thinking that every single sacrifice, every missed meal, every eighteen hour work day, every pair of shoes he wore until they fell apart, all of it was worth it because he had this. He had a son.

And none of it was real.

Mason was not his boy. Had never been his boy. Five years of love, five years of breaking his back to provide for a child that another man had put into his wife's belly. 

Five years of being a father to someone else's son while the real father took his wife to amusement parks and fancy dinners and let a five year old call him Daddy.

Caleb closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the steering wheel. His breath came in short, ragged bursts. His fists clenched so tight that his nails dug crescents into his palms.

He stayed like that for a long time.

Then he sat up. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He opened his phone again and saved the report to three different locations. Cloud storage, a private email, and the prepaid phone he had bought on the way to the PI agency.

He took one long, slow breath.

A billion dollars was sitting in a wallet with his name on it. A team of lawyers and tax experts were about to turn that wallet into an empire. A private investigator was already digging up every secret his wife had ever buried. 

And now he had proof, black and white, stamped and certified, that the child she had used to chain him to this marriage was not his.

He was not going to lose his mind over these people. They were not worth it. Not Natalie, not Brandon, not any of them. They had taken six years of his life, and they would not take a single day more.

His first priority was stopping the divorce. He could not let Natalie walk away with his house, his savings, and his dignity under a settlement that was signed by a man who did not know he was being played. After that, once Greg delivered the evidence, he would countersue her for everything. Infidelity. Fraud. Paternity deception. He would drag her through every courtroom in this city until there was nothing left.

He started the car and drove home.

It was 3:40 when he pushed open the front door. Natalie was standing in the middle of the living room with Mason pressed against her hip, one arm wrapped around the boy protectively. Her face was tight, her lips pressed together, and her eyes were locked on Caleb before he even got both feet through the door.

"We need to talk." Her voice was low and controlled, the way it always got when she had spent hours rehearsing what she wanted to say.

"About what?"

"About this morning." She shifted Mason higher on her hip. "Mason told me what happened. He asked you for a glass of water and you told him to get it himself. He's five years old, Caleb."

Caleb looked at the boy. Mason stared back at him with those eyes. Those eyes that belonged to someone else. The boy's face was blank, almost bored, like watching his parents argue was something he had seen a hundred times and no longer found interesting.

"He's old enough to walk to the kitchen."

"That's not the point and you know it." Natalie took a step forward. "You scared him. He's been upset all day. I want you to apologize to him. Right now."

Caleb looked at Mason for a long time. The boy he had rocked to sleep a thousand nights. The boy he had carried on his shoulders through the park every Sunday. 

The boy whose birthday cakes he had baked with his own hands because they could not afford to buy one from a bakery.

The boy who was not his.

"No."

Natalie's eyes widened. "Excuse me?"

"I said no." Caleb set his bag down by the door and straightened up. His voice was calm, but something in it made Natalie take half a step back without realizing it. "I'm done apologizing in this house, Natalie. For everything."

"What is wrong with you today? You quit your jobs, you refuse to give your own son a glass of water, and now you won't even say sorry?" Her voice climbed half a pitch. "What is going on?"

Caleb looked at her. Really looked at her. At the woman who had shared his bed for six years while carrying another man's secrets. At the woman who had held his hand and told him she loved him while someone else held the rest of her. At the woman who had handed him a divorce agreement and watched him sign away everything without blinking.

"Let me ask you something, Natalie." His voice dropped so low it was barely above a whisper. His eyes did not blink. His body did not move. "Who is Brandon?"