Chapter 984
Skye didn’t answer. She pulled the burnt doll from her bag and dropped it onto Gemma’s chest.
Gemma shrieked, scrambling backward across the table. “Ew! What is that? It’s filthy — get it away from me!” She brushed the doll away as though it were a dead rat. It hit the floor with a soft thud.
Skye watched every flicker of her reaction. The disgust was genuine. The confusion was genuine.
“You don’t recognize it?” Skye asked softly.
“Recognize what? A piece of trash? You’re insane!” Gemma snapped.
Skye smiled — a cold, precise thing.
“That’s Mr. Buttons,” Skye said. “My — I mean, the Sterling heir’s — favorite toy. She slept with it every night for five years.”
Gemma blinked. “I… I forgot. The trauma —”
“Trauma doesn’t make you afraid of your best friend,” Skye said.
She held up her phone. She had recorded everything.
𝘕оvе𝗅𝘀 𝗂ո 𝗍𝘳𝖾𝗇d 𝗼n 𝗀al𝗻o𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀.𝘤𝗼𝗆
Gemma’s face twisted. “You set me up.”
Skye bent down and picked up the doll.
“I’m going to destroy you, Vanessa,” she whispered.
The Sterling Group shareholder meeting was a sea of gray suits and nervous murmurs. The stock was still down, and Arthur Sterling paced the stage, sweating beneath the lights.
Gemma sat in the front row wearing a modest navy suit, doing her best to look executive.
Arthur took the microphone. “Today, we begin a new chapter. I am proud to sign over the voting rights to the true heir —”
“Wait.”
Skye walked onto the stage from the wings. She was wearing white. Not surrender. Purification.
“Skye,” Arthur growled. “Security!”
“Let her speak!” Liam rose from the front row. His assets were still frozen, but his voice still carried weight.
Arthur turned a withering look on him. “You traitor.”
Skye plugged a USB drive into the podium laptop. “Parker, now,” she murmured into her lapel mic.
The massive screen behind Arthur changed. It played the video from the spa — Gemma screaming, recoiling, brushing the doll away like something diseased.
A gasp moved through the room.
Then a new image appeared. A side-by-side comparison: Vanessa Kincaid’s headshot beside Gemma Sterling, and a medical file from a clinic in Brazil.
“Arthur Sterling paid two million dollars for that face,” Skye said into the microphone. “And he bribed the lab technician who processed the DNA test. We recovered the deleted transaction logs.”
Gemma shot to her feet. “That’s a lie!”
“Is it?” Skye beckoned toward the wings.
An old woman walked out, leaning on a cane, her back bent with age. Mrs. Higgins — the Sterling housekeeper for thirty years.
She looked at Gemma. Then she looked at the doll in Skye’s hands.
Skye placed the doll in her arms. Mrs. Higgins clutched it to her chest and wept.
“That’s Miss Skye’s,” Mrs. Higgins said into the microphone, her voice breaking. “She never let it go. Not even when she bathed. And she stitched that button eye herself.” She raised a trembling finger toward Gemma. “That girl didn’t know the doll. She isn’t her.”
The room erupted. Shareholders shouted over one another. Camera flashes strobed across the stage.
.