Chapter 617
The crowd remained utterly silent.
The looks they directed at Celeste no longer held a single trace of affection or pity, leaving only an endless, complicated void.
Eleanor leaned against Declan’s shoulder with her eyes closed, her breathing dangerously shallow.
Helena was still seizing, her eyes rolling back as she slurred a frantic, unintelligible mumble, W-woo… shameless p>
Jarred stood by the bed, his back to everyone, his thin lips pressed into a harsh line.
His obsidian eyes had never looked darker, locking away every last ounce of his emotions.
Sienna was sick of watching Celeste’s pathetic acting. She raised her hand toward Thea.
Thea caught the cue instantly and placed the final document into Sienna’s palm.
Gripping the file, Sienna’s frigid voice sliced through the dead silence.
“Since you insist on playing the victim and refuse to confess, why don’t we have a nice chat about the truth of Jarred’s kidnapping at Azure Ridge p>
Eleanor’s eyes snapped wide open.
Helena’s convulsions stopped for a fraction of a second, and even Jarred’s broad back went imperceptibly rigid.
Celeste sat in her wheelchair, her pupils entirely blown and unfocused.
Her pale fingers clawed at the armrests as if holding onto her last lifeline.
Yet this lifeline was slipping from her grasp, inch by agonizing inch.
Before Celeste could spit out another lie, Eleanor clutched her chest, demanding answers.
The matriarch fell into a violent coughing fit before she could even finish her sentence.
Her face flushed crimson, entirely stripped of the strength to speak another word.
She could only slump in the chair like a corpse, gasping greedily for air.
Sienna remained unfazed, her eyes on the papers, her sharp voice piercing the ward.
“The entire incident regarding Jarred’s kidnapping was, from start to finish, a meticulously orchestrated scam p>
The moment her calm, chilling declaration fell, all the ambient noise in the ward died entirely.
Everyone froze, their pupils shrinking in unison as unadulterated shock seized their features.
Helena shrieked, her face beet-red, exhausting everything she had just to push out those two words.
After speaking, her clouded eyes were completely bloodshot.
Ignoring the stunned stares of the crowd, Sienna’s expression remained glacial as she leisurely unfolded the visual evidence.
A screen flickered to life, slowly playing a piece of surveillance footage, its grainy quality a testament to its age.
The footage clearly documented the day before Jarred was abducted.
A private car brazenly appeared on the mountain roads of Azure Ridge, and the person in the driver’s seat was none other than Celeste
The camera caught her driving deep into the mountains entirely alone, without a single companion.
When the car reappeared on the feed, two full hours had passed.
Celeste drove slowly down the mountain, her movements highly suspicious.
She had spent two solid hours completely alone in the treacherous terrain of Azure Ridge.
Jarred’s eyes turned leaden as he fixated intensely on the camera’s angle.
It took only one glance for him to accurately identify that this was the surveillance feed from the old Sloan family estate.
The old Sloan estate sat perfectly in the heart of Azure Ridge, naturally covering the exact core area where the kidnapping occurred.
He remembered Sienna telling him that her grandfather had sold the old estate long before she came to the Sterlings.
She had lied to him again.
Jarred lifted his eyes to Sienna, something in his gaze violently shattering and reassembling in a fraction of a second.
Before anyone could recover from the sheer shock of the footage, Sienna spoke.
“Ms. Carlyle, would you kindly tell everyone exactly what you were doing during those two hours in the mountains? And who you were meeting p>