Chapter 463
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Chapter 463:
The clerk stamped the package. “Five business days for the expedited results, ma’am p>
“Thank you,” Carmen said.
She walked out of the logistics center and looked up at the gray Manhattan sky. Five days. In exactly five days, the suffocating web of lies Justin Collins had built around her entire existence would be torn apart.
Ten minutes after Carmen’s Porsche pulled away from the Upper East Side townhouse, the atmosphere inside the basement security room was suffocating.
Lee, Justin’s head of security, sat in a leather chair staring at a wall of massive high-definition monitors, his jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached. On the center screen, he had pulled up footage from the hidden camera in Aaden’s bedroom.
The nanny had missed it entirely, standing just outside the door — but the high-definition lens concealed in the smoke detector had not. Lee rewound the footage. He zoomed in. He reduced the playback to a frame-by-frame crawl.
On the screen, Carmen Golden stood, crossed to the chair, and pretended to adjust the blazer. Her fingers moved with lightning speed, plucking a single hair from the fabric and sliding it into a small plastic bag.
Lee drew a sharp breath.
He knew exactly what that meant. If Carmen Golden ran a DNA test and discovered the truth, the political fallout for Senator Collins would be catastrophic — a scandal with the power to end careers and put people in federal prison.
He didn’t hesitate. He pulled out his encrypted satellite phone and dialed Justin’s private line.
𝗥om𝖺𝘯𝘤𝖾 𝗮𝗇𝗱 𝗉a𝘀𝗌іon оո ѕ.𝗰о𝗆
Two hundred miles away, inside a vast, intimidating office on Capitol Hill, Senator Justin Collins stood behind his mahogany desk in a perfectly tailored navy suit. Three senior political aides occupied the sofas across from him, delivering a rapid-fire presentation on the upcoming quarter’s campaign fundraising.
Justin’s encrypted phone vibrated sharply against the wood of the desk.
He glanced at the screen, registered Lee’s specific code name, and raised his right hand. “Everyone out p>
His voice wasn’t raised, but it carried an absolute, crushing authority. The aides stopped mid-sentence, gathered their iPads without a word, and filed out of the office, pulling the heavy doors shut behind them.
Justin picked up the phone and walked to the bulletproof glass window, his gaze settling on the Washington Monument in the distance.
“Speak,” he said.
“Senator.” Lee’s voice was tight with controlled panic. “Ms. Golden was just in the townhouse. She secretly extracted a hair follicle sample from Aaden’s jacket p>
The line went completely silent for five agonizing seconds.
Lee held his breath, bracing for the explosion — the furious orders, the demand to intercept the woman and destroy the evidence before it reached its destination.
Instead, a low, dark sound came through the speaker.
Justin Collins was laughing.
Not with panic. It was a soft, deeply unsettling chuckle — the sound of an apex predator watching a beautiful bird fly directly into a glass window.
“Where did she mail it?” Justin asked, his voice unhurried and dripping with a dangerous kind of pleasure.