Chapter 979:

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Silas looked at his granddaughter, at the fierce intelligence burning in her eyes, and gave a slow, solemn nod. “Your instincts are correct.”

“But what?” Cailin pressed. “What could it be? Is it just because I’m a Croft?”

Silas stood and walked to the window, turning his back to her. He stood in silence for a long, heavy minute. The only sound in the room was the quiet, relentless ticking of the clock on the wall.

When he turned back, his eyes were red-rimmed. He looked at Cailin, but it felt as if he were looking through her, at a ghost from the past.

“What I am about to tell you,” he said, his voice raspy with unshed grief, “will change everything you think you know about your life.”

Cailin gripped the bedsheets, her knuckles white. She braced herself. “After the last few days,” she said, her voice hollow, “I don’t think there’s anything left that can break me.”

Silas took a deep, shuddering breath. He began to speak of the past, of a deceptive marriage between his daughter, Genevieve, and a weak, cruel man named Warren Ashford. He spoke of lies and control, of a family built on a foundation of deceit.

Cailin listened, a growing sense of dread coiling in her stomach. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a vast, dark abyss.

Silas paused, his gaze locking with hers.

Then, with a voice as steady and final as a judge’s gavel, he delivered the first blow.

“Garrett Ashford,” he said, referring to the man she had called father for most of her life, “is not your father.”

𝖡𝗲 pа𝘳𝗍 𝗈f 𝘰u𝗿 𝗰𝗈𝘮𝗆u𝗇𝘪𝘁y 𝘰ո 𝘨𝖺𝗅n𝘰𝘷𝖾𝘭𝘴.𝘤𝘰𝗆

The world dissolved into a roar of white noise in Cailin’s ears. She stared at Silas, her lips parted, but no sound came out. The room felt like it was tilting, spinning away from her. She was adrift, her entire history a lie.

And she knew, with a terrifying certainty, that the final, devastating truth was yet to come.

The silence in the room was absolute, a crushing weight. Cailin’s breathing was a shallow, desperate flutter in her chest. She stared at Silas’s lips, waiting for the final, world-shattering word.

Silas closed his eyes for a brief second, as if steeling himself. Then he opened them, and with a voice devoid of anything but grim finality, he said the name.

“Your biological father is Donovan Van Doren.”

The words detonated in the center of Cailin’s brain. Her body jerked backward as if struck, the back of her head hitting the hard wood of the headboard with a sickening thud.

She gasped, but no air came. Her lungs felt like they had collapsed. A dry, ragged retching sound tore from her throat.

No.

Her head shook violently from side to side. Her hands flew up to cover her ears, a futile attempt to block out the monstrous, impossible truth.

The patriarch of the family that had murdered her mother. The patriarch of the family that was murdering her. That man was her father? It was a joke. A sick, cosmic joke.

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