Chapter 71 Shattered

Chapter 71 Shattered

Richard’s POV

After Colton left, I turned back to the work that had been waiting patiently on my desk.

I flipped through pages filled with contacts and correspondence, a follow-up from the ambassador’s office that required careful attention. I 

moved through it methodically, the way I always did,one thing at a time, completely, before moving to the next.

The office was in pretty good shape. Dad was right when he told me that Asher’s group would last a lifetime in my hands.

The knock came an hour later.

“Come in.” I said without looking up

Wade entered and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a folder, and something in the deliberate way he set it on my desk told me this wasn’t routine.

“Sir,” he said. “I think it’s time.”

I leaned back and looked at him.

“Time to come clean.” He announced and dropped the large file on my desk.

He opened the folder.

What he’d compiled was thorough. Call logs between Colton and Kylie spanning months—dates, durations, patterns that told their own story. Financial transfers to accounts that traced back, with careful documentation, to the people who had appeared at the anniversary. The hotel room booking was made three days before the celebration. A receipt for a substance purchased under a false name that matched the chemical profile of what had been identified in the drink I’d been given.

Page after page.

Wade walked me through everything quietly and without drama, the way he always presented difficult information.

When he finished, the folder sat between us on the desk.

“This confirms what Jocelyn has been saying,” I said, genuinely interested.

“It does,” Wade said.

I was quiet for a moment.

“She told me once that Colton killed me,” I said. “In another life. She said they tampered with my jet.”

Wade looked at me carefully. “What do you think about that?”

“I think it’s mythical,” I said. “Knowledge of the future. Past lives. It’s not something a rational man accepts.”

“With respect, sir,” Wade said, “maybe she didn’t know the future. Maybe she lived in the past.”

I looked at him.

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“Probably,” he agreed. “And yet she knew about the jet before you’d told anyone you were traveling. She knew about Kylie and Colton before there was any evidence. She knew things she had no rational way of knowing.” He paused. “I’m not saying I believe it. I’m saying it’s worth noting.”

I said nothing. Because there was no comfortable response to it.

“What I do know,” Wade continued, “is that the evidence in this folder is real. And Colton is going to keep moving until something stops him.”

“Then we give him room to move,” I said. “We set the trap and we lie low and we wait for him to walk into it himself.”

Wade nodded slowly. “Agreed. The quieter we are, the more confident he becomes. And confident men make mistakes.”

“Exactly.” I closed the folder. “Document everything from this point. Every move he makes in this office. Every call he takes. Every meeting.”

“Already started,” Wade said.

I almost smiled.

“The paternity results,” I said. “Everything is in order for tomorrow?”

“Everything is confirmed,” Wade said. “The hospital has been cooperative. The process is clean and documented. Whatever the result says, it’s unimpeachable.”

I exhaled slowly.

“Let’s see what they’re up to tommorow” 

“You’re not worried,” Wade observed. It wasn’t quite a question.

“I’m human,” I said. “Of course I’m worried.”

“Jocelyn isn’t lying to you, sir,” Wade said simply. “I’ve watched her closely enough to know the difference. That child is yours.”

Something in my chest settled at that—not completely, but enough.

“Thank you, Wade.”

His phone buzzed. He glanced at it and stepped back slightly, giving me the desk. I reached for the follow-up correspondence and was three lines in when my own phone rang.

The house number.

I answered.

Martha’s voice came through—high and fractured in a way I had never heard from her before.

I was standing before she finished the sentence.

The movement was involuntary. The kind that comes from somewhere below thought entirely.

Wade straightened immediately. “Sir—”

“Stay,” I said. “Look over the office. Lock the Colton files.”

“I’m coming with you—”

“Wade.” I looked at him once. “Stay.”

I was out the door before he could respond.

I drove faster than I should have.

The city was doing what cities do in the early evening—contracting, filling with the accumulated traffic of people trying to get somewhere else. I navigated through it with controlled aggression, reading the gaps, pushing where I could.

Then the intersection at Broad Street.

A truck running a light I hadn’t seen change. I yanked the wheel hard, felt the rear of the car fishtail, heard the horn and the screech of brakes that were not mine.

I stopped in the middle of the intersection.

My hands were gripping the wheel so tightly my knuckles had gone pale.

The road safety began to approach and I can’t take chances to get delayed

So I braced up and drove without turning back.

The hospital corridor was white and too bright and smelled of antiseptic and something else beneath it that I had always associated with outcomes I didn’t want to think about.

I saw them before they saw me.

Lilian, seated in one of the plastic chairs, her hands pressed over her face. Martha standing nearby, moving from one foot to the other in the particular way of someone whose body cannot accept stillness. 

I looked up, only to see Eric and Megan.

What were they doing here? How did the information reach their ears?

Eric and Megan stood near the far wall, Megan’s hand on Lilian’s shoulder, Eric standing slightly apart with his arms crossed and his face set into an expression I couldn’t immediately read.

And Colton.

Colton was crying.

I stood in the corridor entrance and looked at my nephew, who had his face turned away and his shoulders moving with what appeared to be genuine distress.

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I walked past him.

Past Eric. Past Megan. Past Martha.

I went directly to my mother and crouched in front of her, taking her hands from her face and holding them in mine.

“Mum.”

She looked at me with red eyes and said the words the doctor had apparently already used.

“They say her life is in danger, Richard. They say it’s very serious.” Her eyes glistened with tears 

The white corridor seemed to narrow slightly.

“Where is the doctor?” I asked.

He came out seven minutes later, a composed man in his fifties with careful eyes and the particular manner of someone who had delivered difficult information many times and had not become careless with it.

“Who is the patient’s guardian?” he asked the assembled group.

Colton took a step forward.

I turned my head and looked at him.

Just that. Nothing more.

He stopped moving and stepped back.

I turned to the doctor. “I am.”

The doctor led me away from the group, down the corridor to a quieter alcove, and told me everything in the measured language of medicine that somehow made things both clearer and more devastating simultaneously.

The substance was Oleander extract—processed and concentrated, introduced through something she had consumed. Her body had responded severely. The baby had not survived the assault.

And Jocelyn herself was in critical condition.

“We are doing everything possible,” the doctor said. “But I want you to understand the severity of what we are managing.”

I stood and listened and said nothing until he finished.

“Do everything,” I said then. “Whatever it requires. Save the mother” 

My voice came out steady.

But as the doctor walked back toward the ward, I turned to face the wall of the alcove and pressed my hand flat against it and stood there for a moment that belonged entirely to me.

The tears came quietly. Not the performed grief of someone who wanted to be seen, but the private and involuntary kind that comes when something is simply too large to contain.

This was supposed to be my child.

Boy or girl, whatever the test confirmed tomorrow, whatever name we eventually chose in whatever quiet moment we eventually found—this was supposed to be mine. 

Proof that something good had come from all of it.

That the complications and the danger and the months of difficulty had produced something real and lasting and irreplaceable.

And now.

I straightened. Pressed my fingers briefly to my eyes. Turned back toward the waiting area.

They all looked up when I returned.

“The baby is gone,” I said.

The words were simple because there was no better way to say them.

Lilian made a sound I had never heard from my mother before. Megan moved toward her immediately. Martha’s face went the color of the corridor wall and she pressed her hand over her mouth.

I watched all of them. Every face. Every reaction.

I did not mention what the doctor had told me about the Oleander extract. About the concentration of it. About the fact that this was not an accident and had never been an accident.

The person responsible was in this corridor.

I would find out who without announcing that I was looking.

Eric crossed the space between us.

“Richard.” His voice was careful and measured. “Given what has happened tonight, there would be no point continuing with the paternity test tomorrow. Under the circumstances—”

“Everyone is to assemble at the designated venue tomorrow,” I said. “At the scheduled time.”

I didn’t look at him when I said it.

I turned back toward the ward where Jocelyn was fighting for her life.

But behind me, I felt it—the sharp, involuntary tightening of my brother’s fists.

I felt it and I filed it away alongside everything else I was collecting.

And I kept walking.