He didn't wait. The corrosive truth was a live wire in his brain,
burning away all caution, all strategy. He drove back to the estate as the
morning sun painted the manicured grounds in deceptively cheerful light. He
didn't go to his father. He went straight to the source of the new, intimate
horror.
He found Vivian in her morning room, bathed in the soft glow, sipping
herbal tea and reviewing a portfolio of nursery fabrics. The scene of domestic
planning was so normal, so vile, it stole his breath for a moment.
She looked up, a polite, practiced smile already forming. It faltered as
she saw his face. "Julian. You look dreadful. Is it the market? I told Arthur
that volatility was—"
"Who is the father?" The question cut through the room, raw and direct.
Vivian's smile vanished. A shutter fell behind her eyes. "I don't know
what you mean. The donor was anonymous. A healthy, vetted candidate from an
elite agency. It's all perfectly—"
"The clinic report says Cohort J.C.," he interrupted, his voice low and
lethal. He took a step forward, holding up his phone where he'd photographed
the damning footnote. "From the family repository. My repository."
The porcelain cup rattled in its saucer as her hand trembled. The colour
drained from her carefully maintained complexion. For a long moment, she simply
stared at him, the façade crumbling to reveal the cold, calculating
architecture beneath. Then, to his shock, her chin lifted. There was no denial.
There was, instead, a terrifying pride.
"So, you found it." She set the cup down with deliberate calm. "I
wondered when you would. You have your father's curiosity. Steven's, I mean."
Hearing her say it so casually, acknowledging the truth while sitting
amid swatches of silk for a crib, was more disturbing than any lie.
"Why?" The word was ripped from him. "How could you even conceive of
something so… monstrous?"
"Monstrous?" She let out a short, sharp laugh that held no humour. "I
was saving you! Purifying the line!" Her composure began to crack, a hairline
fracture spreading. "You were always his! From the moment you came into this
house, a squalling little piece of her tragedy, you had his eyes, his restless
spirit. Arthur saw a tool to be shaped. I saw a… a contamination. A constant
reminder of the woman who came before me, of the brother who betrayed him."
She rose, pacing to the window, her hand resting on the slight curve of
her abdomen—a curve that now made Julian feel physically ill. "Arthur's
obsession was the legacy. Mine was the family. A real one. But I couldn't give
him a child. And he refused to let the Cohen name end with… with a borrowed
son."
She turned back to him, her eyes blazing with a fervid, unhinged light.
"And then I realised. The solution was so elegant. The family bank. Your
contribution. It was pure Cohen material, but without you in it. Without your…
instability. Your sentimentality. I could take the best of the bloodline—the
intelligence, the strength—and filter out the flaw. I could give Arthur a true
heir, and I could finally have a child that was mine. Not hers. Not Steven's.
Mine."
Her logic was a spiralling madness, a narcissistic circuit of jealousy
and possession. She saw him not as a person, but as a contaminated resource she
could refine.
"You used me," he breathed, disgust roiling in his gut. "You made me an
unwitting father to my own… to my own…"
"Sibling?" she finished, the word a deliberate dagger. "That's what
she'll call you. And you'll be the doting brother. You'll guide her. And when
the time is right, you'll step aside for the legitimate heir. The pure heir.
It's perfect."
"She is my daughter!" he roared, the force of it shaking the delicate
crystals in a cabinet.
Vivian didn't flinch. Instead, a strange, beatific smile touched her
lips. "Yes. She is. And she is also mine. Don't you see? I finally won. I took
the one thing that tied you to that ghost, that sad little artist, and I made
it ours. I gave you a part of yourself that is just mine! A child with no trace
of Elora. A fresh canvas. I am her mother. And in the most profound way, I am
now yours as well."
The twisted love in her words was the most horrifying thing he had ever
heard. It was the love of a creator for her experiment, of a collector for her
most prized, most stolen artefact. Her jealousy of the first Elora had metastasised
into this: a desire not just to replace her, but to become her, in the most
grotesque way imaginable, by bearing the child of the son she had stolen.
Julian felt the room tilt. He was staring into the abyss of a soul so
warped by envy and a hunger for legacy that it had committed this ultimate
violation and called it love.
"You're insane," he whispered.
"I'm visionary!" she shot back, the madness now fully naked. "I have
solved the problem of our family! I have secured the future! When Arthur knows,
he will understand. He will see the genius of it!"
"Arthur doesn't know?" The revelation was a small, cold shock.
Her confidence flickered. "Not… the specifics of the source material. He
believed in the anonymous donor. He wanted a clean heir. The purity was all
that mattered to him." She drew herself up, regaining a shred of her icy poise.
"And it will remain that way. For everyone. This child will be raised as our
miracle. Our late blessing. You will play your part, Julian. For the family.
For her. Or do you want to explain to the world what you think she is? Do you
want to brand her with this scandal before she even draws breath?"
The threat was clear. She would use the child as a shield, gambling that
his burgeoning, horrified sense of paternal protectiveness would force his
silence.
He looked at her, this woman who had played a mother, who had curated
his life and now held a piece of his biology growing inside her. The hatred was
a cold, dead weight. But beneath it was a terrifying, overwhelming
responsibility. For the child. His child.
He said nothing. He turned and walked out, leaving her standing amid the
nursery fabrics, a mad queen in her sunlit chamber.
As he walked back through the hollow halls, her final, whispered words
chased him, a serpent's tail of poison: "You should be thanking me, Julian.
I've made you immortal. And I've finally erased her."
He didn't know if she meant Elora, or the part of himself he'd lost. It
didn't matter. The battlefield had just shifted beneath his feet once more. He
wasn't just fighting ghosts and architects anymore. He was fighting for the
soul of a child who didn't yet exist, against a mother who saw that child as
the ultimate trophy in a war he never knew he was fighting. The path forward
was darker, more twisted than ever. But for the first time, his purpose was
brutally, horrifically clear.