Chapter 980:

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Silas moved forward. He gently but firmly pulled her hands away from her head, forcing her to face him, forcing her to face the ugly reality.

He slid a single sheet of paper from the bottom of the black folder and placed it in front of her.

A DNA comparison report.

The clinical, black-and-white numbers were a death sentence to her identity. 99.99% match. Father. Daughter.

𝖣ow𝗻l𝘰а𝗱 𝘗𝘋𝖥𝘀 frе𝖾 𝗼n 𝗀𝖺𝘭𝗻𝗼𝗏e𝗅𝘀.𝖼𝘰𝘮

She shoved the paper away as a violent wave of nausea overcame her. She leaned over the side of the bed and vomited, her body convulsing with dry, painful heaves. Tears, hot and uncontrollable, streamed down her face.

Silas stood over her, his hand resting gently on her back. “This is why she wants you dead, Cailin,” he said, his voice thick with a terrible, weary sadness. “Your existence is a fatal threat to her position. You are the one secret she can’t afford to have revealed.”

Cailin wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She pushed herself up, her empty eyes now blazing with a wild, terrifying hatred. It was a hatred for her own blood, her own cursed existence.

“I wish I had never been born,” she spat, the words laced with a venom that was aimed at herself.

Silas straightened up, his expression hardening back into cold, resolute steel. “The blood of a Croft will not be spilled in vain,” he declared. “I am going to their estate on Long Island. I am going to get the antidote, and I am going to get justice.”

Cailin’s hand shot out, grabbing the sleeve of his jacket. “No,” she rasped. “You can’t. Eleonora is insane. It’s a death trap.”

A humorless smile touched Silas’s lips. “In New York City,” he said, his voice filled with the quiet arrogance of immense power, “there is no one who would dare lay a hand on the head of the Croft family.”

He gently pried her fingers from his sleeve. “I will return with the cure,” he promised. “And with Donovan’s head.”

He turned and strode from the room. Outside the door, four armed bodyguards fell into formation around him, a moving wall of impenetrable security.

The door clicked shut, leaving Cailin alone in the suffocating silence. The world was spinning, collapsing in on itself.

She ripped out the new IV line in her hand without a second thought. She had to move. She couldn’t just wait here to die.

She stumbled from the bed, a wave of dizziness from the poison washing over her. She pulled on a large trench coat from the closet, covering her thin hospital gown.

Leaning against the wall for support, she made her way out of the room, down the deserted corridor, and into an empty elevator.

She emerged on the ground floor, melting into a crowd of visitors, and slipped out into the cold afternoon air. She found her way to a secluded hospital garden, the wind a welcome shock against her feverish skin.

She collapsed onto a cold stone bench by a gurgling fountain, her body trembling with weakness, her lungs burning.

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