Chapter 3 The Inside Job
1299 Words
The day we were discharged, Arthur brought four private bodyguards to escort us.
Two luxury vans kept us perfectly sequestered, ensuring a seamless, high-security transition the entire way.
During the twenty-minute drive from the hospital to Sterling Villa, Sarah never let me out of her arms for a single second.
Arthur sat in the passenger seat, taking call after call. "Upgrade the entire smart home system. I want zero blind spots. None. Install biometric alarms in the nursery. If anyone breaches the perimeter, I want a real-time push notification on my phone. Yes, clean house with the staff. Run deep-dive background checks on everyone. Cross-reference their relatives up to three degrees of separation."
Curled up against Sarah, listening to him bark orders, I had never felt safer.
In my previous life, the only reason I was stolen so easily was because my parents, despite their massive wealth, were shockingly naive about security.
The idea of a newborn being swapped was completely unfathomable to them.
But this lifetime was entirely different.
Arthur was already operating on a war footing.
When we pulled into the driveway of the villa, I was stepping into my true home as its rightful heir for the very first time.
In my previous life, I didn't walk through those wrought-iron gates until I was twenty years old.
Back then, I was wearing a cheap dress, shivering like a leaf as I clutched a crumpled DNA test in my fist.
The security guards at the gate shoved me away three times. "Who are you looking for? You don't belong here, kid."
But today, the head butler respectfully opened the car door.
Staff members were already waiting by the front entrance before the SUV had fully stopped.
My grandpa, Jacob Sterling, stood at the grand entrance, his face breaking into a massive, wrinkled grin. "There's my beautiful granddaughter! Let me get a good look at you!"
He reached out his arms to hold me. Right on cue, I scrunched up my face. But this time, I held back my tears.
After all, Jacob treated me well in my previous life. When I finally came back, he was the very first person in the family who insisted on cutting me into the inheritance.
So, I just turned my face away and buried my nose into Sarah's neck.
Jacob wasn't offended in the slightest. In fact, he threw his head back and laughed. "She's got her mother's temper! Once she decides something, that's it. Stubborn just like her mother. Good! I love a girl with a spine!"
My grandma, Lily Sterling, stood right behind him. Wearing a dark crimson silk dress, she carried herself with a perfectly mannered smile.
I quickly caught on, however, that her gaze shifted drastically depending on who she was looking at. Toward Jacob, her demeanor was one of meticulous respect and submission.
But when she looked at me, her smile never quite reached her eyes.
"Oh my, what a darling, radiant baby. She takes after her mother so much," she cooed, reaching out a hand to stroke my cheek.
Without missing a beat, I burst into tears, letting out a series of pathetic, heartbreaking little sobs.
Her hand froze in mid-air.
Sarah immediately started bouncing me. "Oh, sweetie, don't cry! It's okay. It's just Grandma."
Jacob chuckled, trying to smooth things over. "She's just a bit shy around new faces. Give it a few days."
Lily pulled her hand back. Her smile didn't waver, but a flicker of bone-deep detachment flashed in the depths of her eyes.
I knew that look all too well. When I returned to the villa in my previous life, that was the exact same way Lily looked at me.
She stayed perfectly polite, but there was always distance there.
Only later did I learn that my grandmother had been fiercely opposed to my father marrying my mother from the very beginning. She looked down on my mother's background, believing it was far beneath the Sterling family's stature.
Instead, she desperately wanted her second son, Brandon Sterling, to inherit the empire.
This was because Brandon's wife happened to be Lily's own maternal niece.
As far as Lily was concerned, Brandon's side of the family was the one that mattered.
The first few weeks at Sterling Villa were deceptively peaceful.
In the weeks leading up to my Sip and See milestone party, I kept doing what had worked from the beginning. Stay calm with Mom. Scream for everyone else.
Wherever Sarah went, I was perfectly quiet. The second she stepped out of my line of sight, I would scream the house down.
Because of this, Sarah practically became my shadow. Which meant no one—neither the nannies, the butler, nor Lily herself—had a single second alone with me.
Meanwhile, Arthur's investigation was gaining traction. His tech guys pulled Gemma's phone records.
They found one specific burner phone she called constantly. The calls were always brief but incredibly systematic.
The number wasn't registered to a real name. Yet, according to the triangulation data, the burner phone spent seventy percent of its active airtime right around the perimeter of Sterling Villa.
Arthur locked himself in his study, his face looking grim as he spoke to his assistant, "Are you telling me the person pulling Gemma's strings is living inside my house?"
An inside job.
I already knew that. But trapped in a baby's body, I couldn't exactly point a finger and tell him who it was.
I could only bide my time. I would wait for his investigation to bear fruit or wait for the traitor to trip over their own shadow. Fortunately, the wait would be incredibly short.
It was eleven o'clock at night, just two days before the scheduled Sip and See party.
Sarah was dead asleep. Arthur was down the hall in his study.
Even the night nanny had retired to her room for the evening.
Left entirely to myself in the nursery, I found the room swallowed by a dead silence.
Moonlight spilled through the sheer curtains, casting pale shadows across the ceiling.
With my eyes alert in the darkness, I counted my shallow breaths—one, two, three. And then it came: the sharp click of the doorknob slowly rotating.
Someone pushed open the nursery door.
The footsteps were incredibly light, deliberately muffled.
A dark silhouette crept toward my crib.
I couldn't make out her face in the dark, but the familiar smell hit me immediately.
It was Martha Lee, the head housekeeper who had served Lily for over twenty years.
Martha leaned over the crib rail and reached her hands toward me, trying to scoop me up.
The absolute second her fingers brushed my blanket, I unleashed the most deafening scream of my entire existence.
In that exact same second, the nursery's smart alarm tripped.
A high-decibel siren shattered the silence of the massive villa.
Arthur's phone immediately buzzed with a breach notification.
Bathed in the flashing red strobe lights of the alarm, Martha's face went ghastly pale. She was completely paralyzed in fear.
Less than twenty seconds later, Arthur kicked the nursery door wide open. Sarah was right on his heels.
"Martha? What the hell are you doing?!" he yelled.
Martha was shaking violently, her hands still hovering rigidly over my crib. "I... I heard the baby crying! I just came to check on her..."
Arthur yanked out his phone and pulled up the live playback of the nursery feed.
The footage was crystal clear: Martha walking in, making a beeline for the crib, and reaching down to grab me before I even made a sound.
She wasn't checking on me.
She was taking me.
"Tell me the truth," Arthur demanded, his voice slicing through the room like a cold blade. "Who sent you?"
- Writer
