Chapter 422
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Chapter 422:
Her brain short-circuited. The strength vanished instantly from her legs. She collapsed, her knees slamming hard into the floorboards.
She opened her mouth, but her lungs refused to work. She was suffocating on her own agony.
Ferris looked down at her, his face completely blank.
“To spare you the trauma when you woke up,” he continued, twisting the blade, “we took his ashes to Switzerland. We gave him an eco-burial. A tree was planted over him. There is no grave. There is nothing left p>
A sound that did not belong to a human being tore from Carmen’s throat — a primal, soul-shredding howl of absolute, irreversible loss.
𝘗oр𝘶l𝘢r 𝘴𝘁о𝘳𝗂𝗲s оn ѕ.𝗰𝗼𝗆
She pitched forward, her forehead pressing into the floor. Her fingers clawed at the rug, her nails scraping against the fibers until they bled.
“My baby!” Carmen screamed, her voice shattering into a thousand jagged pieces. “My little boy p>
Ferris stood over her, watching her soul fracture into dust.
The lie was monstrous. But it was perfect. The trail was dead. She would never look for the child again.
Ferris Golden stared down at his cousin.
Carmen was curled into a tight fetal ball on the expensive Persian rug, her fingers clawing desperately at the wool fibers. The guttural, animalistic sounds tearing from her throat did not sound human. It was the sound of a mother’s soul being physically ripped in half.
A brief, sharp flash of guilt hit Ferris’s chest. He swallowed hard, tasting bile. But the guilt was instantly crushed by the cold, hard reality of self-preservation. If the truth came out, his parents would go to federal prison for illegal adoption and fraud. The Golden family name would be destroyed.
Ferris turned his back on her and walked toward the heavy apartment door. He reached out, his fingers wrapping around the cold brass of the doorknob. He just needed to turn it, step into the hallway, and this nightmare would be buried forever.
But as his hand gripped the handle, his mind stalled.
Ferris was a senior Wall Street executive. His brain was wired to find loopholes and mitigate risk. Suddenly, a massive, glaring flaw in his lie flashed behind his eyes like a neon warning sign.
Switzerland.
He had told her they took the ashes to Switzerland.
A cold sweat broke out instantly across his shoulder blades, soaking through his expensive camel-hair coat. If Carmen, in her desperate search for closure, booked a flight to Zurich and hired someone to comb through customs and immigration databases, she would find that seven years ago there was absolutely no record of a deceased infant or an urn being transported out of the United States under the Golden family name.
The lie would collapse entirely. And Carmen would start digging again.
Ferris let go of the doorknob.
He turned around. He forced his facial muscles into a mask of profound, heavy sorrow and walked back across the room. He crouched down beside her and gripped her shaking shoulder, compelling her to acknowledge him.