Pregnant For The Alpha I Never Met

Investigations

MILLIE'S POV

I woke up to the throbbing pain in my arm where Sabrina had cut me. The bandage was clean but the pain was constant, a reminder of how close I'd come to sharing my mother's fate.

Braham was already awake, standing by the window with his phone pressed to his ear. I caught fragments of his conversation.

"...Yes, the police found it last night... No, the screen is completely shattered but the internal memory might be intact... they'll send it to a forensic data recovery specialist..."

My heart jumped. The phone. The confession.

I sat up too quickly and my arm protested. Braham noticed immediately, ended his call and rushed to the bed.

"Easy. How's the arm?"

"Painful. But manageable."

He sat on the edge of the bed.

"The screen of your phone is destroyed, but the internal components might have survived the fall. They've sent it to a specialist who works with them. If the audio recording is still there..."

"We'll have her confession. On record." Hope flickered in my chest. "That's huge, Braham. That changes everything."

"If it's recoverable. The specialist said it'll take a few days to assess the damage." He took my hand gently. "But there's more. Will Reid called. He wants to meet with us this morning. Says he's made progress on your mother's case."

"What kind of progress?"

"He wouldn't say over the phone. Just that it's important."

Within an hour, we were dressed and heading to Will's office. Callie had agreed to watch Leo, and I was grateful…I didn't want my son seeing me bandaged and shaken, being told of how his step-grandmother had tried to hurt his mother.

Will's office looked the same as before; organized chaos, whiteboards covered in timelines and notes, stacks of files threatening to topple. But today there was an energy in the air that hadn't been there before.

"Thanks for coming on short notice," Will said, gesturing for us to sit. "I've been working around the clock since Sabrina's attack yesterday."

"And?" I leaned forward.

"And I have good news and complicated news." He pulled out a folder. "The good news first…the DA's office is filing assault charges today. Multiple witnesses, your injury, the knife with her fingerprints. That case is solid."

"What about the murder charge?"

"That's the complicated part." Will opened the folder, revealing documents. "After what happened yesterday, I reached out to several forensic pathologists. Got one on the phone this morning…Dr. Patricia Brown from St. Catherine's Medical Center. She's one of the best in the state."

He slid a document toward me…a preliminary assessment based on my mother's death certificate and medical records from twenty-one years ago.

"Dr. Brown reviewed everything I sent her. She says based on the symptoms documented; nausea, confusion, kidney failure, seizures, it's consistent with ethylene glycol poisoning."

"Antifreeze," Braham whispered. "Just like Sabrina confessed."

"Exactly. But here's our problem." Will leaned back. "Without a body to autopsy, without physical evidence, all we have is Sabrina's confession and circumstantial evidence. Her lawyers will argue she was under duress, mentally unstable, and didn't know what she was saying."

"But multiple people heard her," Braham said. "Me, Renan, the police officers."

"Which helps. But a good defense attorney can still create reasonable doubt." Will pulled out another document. "However, Dr. Brown mentioned something interesting. Hospitals sometimes keep biological samples from unusual deaths; blood, tissue specimens. Not forever, but sometimes longer than they're supposed to, especially when the cause of death is unclear."

My chest tightened. "You think they might still have my mother's blood?"

"It's a long shot. The standard policy is seven to ten years retention. Your mother died twenty-one years ago, so by rights, anything from her case should have been destroyed by now." Will paused. "But Dr. Brown said she'd be willing to personally search St. Catherine's archives. If any samples still exist, she'll find them."

"And if she does?" I could barely breathe.

"Then we test them. Modern toxicology is decades ahead of what was available in 2004. If ethylene glycol is present in those samples, we'll find it." Will made a note. "Combined with Sabrina's confession, the witnesses, and your mother's letters, we'd have an airtight case."

"How long would testing take?"

Will's expression became more serious. "That's where it gets complicated. If we find samples; and that's a big if…the testing itself is actually pretty quick. A few days for the analysis. But for something this old and this critical to a criminal case, we'd need extensive verification."

"What does that mean?"

"Chain of custody documentation. Multiple confirmatory tests. Independent lab verification. We'd need to prove the samples haven't been contaminated or degraded over twenty-one years." He leaned forward. "We're looking at six to eight weeks minimum for comprehensive results that will hold up in court."

My stomach dropped. "Six weeks?"

"At least. I know that's not what you want to hear, Ms. Harvey. But if we rush this, if the testing is flawed or the chain of custody is broken, a defense attorney will tear it apart. We have to do this right."

Six to eight weeks. After twenty-one years of not knowing, what was eight more weeks?

"There's something else," Braham said. "Millie's phone…the one Sabrina knocked out the window during her confession. The police recovered it yesterday. It might have audio of everything she said."

Will's eyes sharpened. "Including the confession?"

"Potentially. The screen is completely destroyed but the internal memory might be intact. The police sent it to their forensic data recovery specialist." Braham glanced at me. "We should know within seventy-two hours if anything's salvageable."

"If we can recover that audio..." Will was already making notes. "A recorded confession, eyewitness testimony, potentially toxicology evidence, plus all the circumstantial evidence we've already gathered. We'd have her dead to rights."

"But only if the phone data is recoverable," I said. "And only if the blood samples still exist."

"One step at a time."

Will stood and walked to one of his whiteboards.

"Here's what we know for certain. Sabrina confessed to poisoning June Oslo with antifreeze in her tea. Multiple witnesses heard this confession. We have financial records showing Sabrina was blackmailing June. We have letters from June's friends warning her about Sabrina. We have June's own letter saying she feared for her life."

He drew connections between the evidence points on the board.

"What we need is physical proof of the poisoning. That's where the blood samples come in. If they exist, if they test positive for ethylene glycol, we can prove beyond reasonable doubt that June was murdered."

"When can we search the hospital archives?" I asked.

"I called Dr. Brown after I got off the phone with Mr Gothan this morning. She's clearing her schedule for tomorrow afternoon." Will turned back to us. "She'll personally oversee the search. If anything from your mother's case still exists, she'll find it."

Braham squeezed my hand.

"Use today to rest," Will suggested. "Your arm needs to heal. And honestly, you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that the samples don't exist. Hospital policies are strict for a reason. The chances of finding anything from 2004 are slim."

"But not impossible," Braham said.

"Not impossible," Will agreed. "Dr. Brown sounded cautiously optimistic. She said there are cases where samples get flagged for extended retention, especially when the attending physician was troubled by the death. And according to the records, Dr. Webb…the doctor who treated your mother…noted several times that he couldn't explain her rapid deterioration."

"He knew something was wrong," I whispered.

"He suspected something was off, yes. But without knowing how to test for antifreeze poisoning, he had no way to prove it." Will closed his folder. "If he flagged your mother's case for extended retention, if he kept those samples hoping someday someone would figure out what really happened, then tomorrow we might get lucky."

After leaving Will's office, Braham and I sat in the car for a long moment without starting the engine.

"What if neither works out? What if the samples are gone and the phone data is corrupted?"

"Then we still have her confession in front of witnesses. We still have all the circumstantial evidence. It's not perfect, but it's enough to prosecute." He reached over and took my hand. "Will is building a strong case, Millie. With or without the physical evidence, Sabrina's going to pay for what she did."

I nodded, trying to believe him. But I wanted more than a strong case. I wanted absolute proof. I wanted evidence so solid that no defense attorney could explain it away.

I wanted the world to know, without any doubt, that my mother was murdered.

"Let's go home," I said finally. "I want to see Leo. I want to hold my son and remember what I'm fighting for."

But as we drove back to the estate, I couldn't stop thinking about those samples that might or might not still exist. About my mother's blood, preserved for twenty-one years, waiting to finally tell the truth about how she died.

Tomorrow couldn't come fast enough.