Chapter 6 - The Other Girl
The DNA samples were collected inside the school infirmary.
Alexander gave blood first.
I gave mine without looking at him.
Victoria refused until the detective asked why her name appeared inside the medical file attached to my birth certificate.
Her mother had kept vaccination records for two infant girls born on the same night.
Ava Rose Vale.
Victoria Claire Langford.
The records used the same hospital identification number.
Victoria allowed the nurse to take her sample.
The laboratory promised preliminary results within three hours.
Those three hours felt longer than the sixteen years before them.
Blackthorne canceled classes. Parents arrived outside the gates. News crews gathered beyond the police barrier after videos from the courtyard reached social media.
The poor girl accused of theft had become the possible daughter of Alexander Vale.
The rich girl who accused her had become part of a second mystery.
I hated the way reporters described us.
As roles.
Thief.
Heiress.
Secret daughter.
No one seemed interested in the years between.
The times Victoria knocked books from my hands.
The afternoon I ate lunch in a bathroom because her friends surrounded my table.
The mornings my mother worked two jobs so I could attend a school that treated my presence as an insult.
A laboratory result could change legal identities.
It could not erase memory.
Victoria sat across from me in the empty infirmary.
Her cheek remained red where Celeste had struck her.
“I did not know the bracelet belonged to your mother.”
“You knew you were framing me.”
“Yes.”
The honesty was ugly.
Better than excuses.
“Why?”
She looked toward the dark window.
“Because everyone expected me to win.”
“That is not a reason.”
“It felt like one.”
She admitted that Celeste had trained her to identify threats. Scholarship students with high grades. Teachers who questioned donations. Board members who spoke privately with Alexander.
I became dangerous when I started searching the old yearbooks for Elena Mercer.
My mother had left me a notebook filled with names from Blackthorne. Most were crossed out.
One remained.
Julian Cross.
I showed Victoria.
She recognized the handwriting beside his name.
A single sentence.
Julian saved me once. He will not do it twice.
Alexander entered.
He had found Julian’s employment history.
Before becoming his security chief, Julian worked as a Blackthorne maintenance assistant. He was seventeen when Elena disappeared.
He had access to the theater tunnels.
He also signed as a witness on my hidden birth certificate.
The figure on the steps had been Julian.
He planted the bracelet.
He sent the message from my mother’s email.
But he had not answered Alexander’s calls because someone was forcing him to follow a different plan.
The preliminary DNA results arrived.
Julia read them silently before handing them to Alexander.
His hand tightened around the page.
The test showed a parent child relationship between us.
Probability greater than 99.9 percent.
Alexander was my biological father.
The room tilted.
For years, I had imagined my father as someone ordinary and disappointing. A man who left because responsibility frightened him.
I had never imagined he was powerful enough to change my entire life yet ignorant that I existed.
Alexander sat across from me.
“I did not know.”
“I know.”
“I would have looked for you.”
“You did not find my mother.”
Pain crossed his face.
It was cruel.
It was also true.
He had believed the Langfords and his father because wealth taught him the system existed to produce facts.
My mother had lived under another name while he built an empire.
Victoria asked about her result.
Julia hesitated.
“You are Celeste Langford’s biological daughter.”
Relief entered Victoria’s face.
Then Julia continued.
“Sebastian Langford is not your biological father.”
The report identified a close genetic relationship between Victoria and me.
Not sisters.
First cousins.
Alexander looked at the percentage.
“My brother.”
He had an older half brother named Nicholas Vale.
Nicholas died in a private plane crash eighteen years earlier.
Before Victoria was born.
Celeste had been involved with him.
The other girl mentioned in the birth record was not me.
It was Victoria.
Her identity had been created to conceal that she was a Vale descendant.
Why?
Because the original Blackthorne charter gave Vale heirs automatic claim to the founder’s voting shares.
Victoria had rights Celeste and Sebastian could control only while she believed herself a Langford.
My trust and Victoria’s inheritance together could remove Celeste’s family from the school completely.
The bullying had hidden two threatened heirs in plain sight.
One trained to attack.
One trained to endure.
A security officer entered.
They had located Caleb Rusk beneath the old gym.
He was alive.
A knife wound crossed his shoulder.
Before losing consciousness, he gave police one address.
The former Vale maternity clinic outside the city.
Alexander recognized it.
May you like
It had closed after a fire on the night Victoria and I were born.
Continue to the next part: Ava and Victoria discover they were born inside the same clinic on the night someone tried to erase both Vale heirs.
