The CEO's Runaway Surrogate

Chapter 4: The Golden Trap

The silence in the dressing room was so heavy that the rapid, frightened thudding of my own heart felt like thunder.

Dominic slowly dropped to one knee before Leo. His large, powerful hands trembled visibly as he reached toward the boy's cheek, stopping just short of touching him as if terrified the child might dissolve like a dream. The ruthless corporate titan who made Wall Street executives tremble looked completely undone.

"He looks like..." Dominic choked on the words, his gaze snapping back to me, wild with a tempest of awe, grief, and fierce accusation. "You were carrying twins. Keller's report stated that the second infant was stillborn."

I stepped forward instantly, putting my body between Dominic and my son, gathering Leo behind the flowing emerald silk of my dress.

"Don't touch him, Dominic," I said, my voice shaking with raw maternal defiance. "He belongs to me. He has nothing to do with the Vance family."

"He has my face, Clara!" Dominic shouted, surging to his feet, his commanding aura exploding through the small room like a shockwave. "He has my eyes, my bone structure, my blood! You stole my son and faked a tragedy to take him from me!"

"Your fiancée tried to murder us in that hospital bed!"

The truth ripped from my throat before I could stop it, echoing off the high plaster ceiling.

Dominic went completely rigid, the color draining from his face. "What did you say?"

"Thirty minutes after I delivered the boys, I heard Vivian Sterling in the prep room," I said, tears of five years of buried terror finally spilling down my cheeks. "She promised Dr. Keller five million dollars to inject me with potassium chloride and declare me dead of postpartum hemorrhaging. She wanted one heir to secure her marriage to you, and she wanted me and the second twin dead so no living surrogate could ever threaten her status!"

Dominic stared at me, his silver eyes wide, the veins in his neck corded with violent disbelief.

"That is an outrageous lie!" a silky, venomous voice chimed from the open doorway.

Vivian Sterling stood in the corridor, draped in a blood-red designer gown and dripping in diamonds. But beneath her flawless makeup, her complexion was ash-white, her eyes bulging with sheer horror as her gaze darted from my face to Leo's.

"Dominic, darling," Vivian stammered, rushing into the room, her voice pitching high and breathless. "She's an extortionist! She stole that baby five years ago to blackmail you! I have stayed by your side, I have helped raise little Julian in your penthouse while this woman hid in the shadows like a common criminal!"

"Julian?" I whispered, my heart breaking anew at the name. "You named the first twin Julian?"

"Be quiet, Vivian," Dominic said.

His voice wasn't loud. It was a razor-thin, icy whisper that carried the lethal finality of a guillotine.

He turned slowly toward his fiancée. He didn't shout. He simply looked at the woman he had known since childhood with eyes so dead, so devoid of humanity, that Vivian took an involuntary step backward, trembling from head to toe.

"You told me the second infant never drew breath," Dominic said, each word dropping like a lead weight. "You wept on my shoulder in the hospital chapel while I buried an empty casket in Green-Wood."

"Dominic, I was grieving too—"

"Mark," Dominic barked toward the hallway.

Two massive Vance security operatives appeared in the doorway like ghosts.

"Take Miss Sterling to the private security holding suite on the second floor," Dominic commanded without looking at her again. "Confiscate her phone, her passport, and her financial keys. If she attempts to leave the building, restrain her by any means necessary."

"Dominic, you can't do this to me!" Vivian shrieked as the guards gripped her arms, dragging her down the corridor. "My father is the chairman of the banking syndicate! You'll destroy the merger!"

Dominic didn't spare her a single glance.

He turned back toward me, the lethal rage in his features softening into a dark, suffocating possessiveness that made my breath catch in my throat.

"The gala is over," Dominic said, unbuttoning his tuxedo cuffs. "We are going home."