Rosalle looked down, a tiny, triumphant smirk flashing across her lips for a fraction of a millisecond before vanishing beneath a fresh wave of artificial sniffles.
She peeked up at Celeste, expecting to see jealousy, rage, or humiliation on the real daughter’s face.
She expected Celeste to scream, to demand that the fake daughter be thrown out, which would instantly alienate the brothers forever.
Instead, when Rosalle looked at her, she found Celeste watching her with a bright, utterly serene smile of pure entertainment.
Celeste had tilted her head slightly, her dark eyes sparkling with genuine amusement.
She wasn’t angry.
She wasn’t jealous.
She looked like a billionaire sitting in a VIP theater balcony, enjoying a moderately entertaining, low-budget comedy performance after a long day at the office.
She even adjusted her stance, resting her hands inside the pockets of her black trench coat, waiting patiently to see if Rosalle had a second act prepared.
The impenetrable indifference in Celeste’s gaze made Rosalle’s chest tighten with a sudden, icy spike of paranoia.
‘Why isn’t she reacting?
Why isn’t she angry?
What is wrong with her?’
Before Rosalle could escalate her routine, the heavy mahogany double doors of the manor clicked open once again.
The subtle hum of an armored luxury SUV pulling away from the courtyard drifted into the foyer, followed by the sound of small, measured footsteps tapping against the marble entryway.
The tension in the room instantly shifted.
The defensive posture of the three older brothers dissolved into wary alertness, while Adrian and Grace immediately turned toward the door, their expressions filling with a mixture of gentle tenderness and deep, habitual concern.
Stepping over the threshold was a ten-year-old boy.
He was wearing the pristine, navy-blue blazer and grey slacks of the city’s most elite private elementary academy.
A small leather backpack was slung over one shoulder. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
His features were remarkably delicate, possessing the exact same sharp, porcelain beauty as Celeste and Arian, but his pale skin had a fragile, translucent quality to it, as if he rarely spent time in the sun.
This was Noah Hartwell, the fourth and youngest brother of the Hartwell family.
When Celeste was kidnapped at nine years old, her mother had been seven months pregnant with him.
He had been born into a household drowning in hysterical grief, police interrogations, and shattered hearts.
As a result of growing up in that suffocating atmosphere, coupled with years of subtle, secret psychological torment inflicted upon him by Rosalle whenever the parents weren’t looking, Noah had grown up profoundly withdrawn.
He was a selective mute around strangers, despised physical contact, and treated his family members with a timid, icy detachment that left his parents heartbroken.
He was a small, isolated ghost haunting the massive corridors of the Hartwell Manor.
Seeing him enter, Rosalle’s eyes lit up with a malicious opportunity.
She immediately put on her most sugary, fake elder-sister smile and stepped forward, kneeling slightly with her arms extended.
“Noah! You’re back from school!” Rosalle cooed, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness as she tried to demonstrate her intimate bond with the household’s youngest heir before the new arrival.
“Come here, let big sister take your backpack. Did you have a good day?”
Noah didn’t even look at her.
He didn’t blink.
He shifted his trajectory three inches to the left, brushing past Rosalle’s outstretched arms as if she were an invisible piece of furniture, leaving her kneeling awkwardly on the rug with her smile freezing on her face.
Sebastian scowled, opening his mouth to reprimand the boy for being rude to Rosalle, but Adrian quickly raised a hand to silence him.
The father turned to Noah, his voice dropping into a soft, careful whisper, as if approaching an easily startled woodland creature.
“Noah,” Adrian said gently.
“You’re home early. Come here, son. There is… there is someone you need to meet. Do not be frightened. This is…”
Adrian paused, his throat tightening as he looked between the small ten-year-old boy and the twenty-year-old woman in black.
“This is your eldest sister. Celeste Grace Hartwell. She has finally come home.”
The entire room held its collective breath. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Grace gripped her husband’s sleeve, her knuckles turning white.
They all knew Noah’s nature.
When unfamiliar business associates or distant relatives visited the manor, Noah would either lock himself in his bedroom or hide behind the curtains, refusing to speak a word.
Introducing him to a biological sister he had never met, a tall, imposing figure clad in black from head to toe, exuding an aura of cool detachment, was a recipe for a massive behavioral regression.
Even Arian and Sebastian tensed, ready to intervene if the boy began to panic or shut down.
Noah stopped in the center of the foyer.
He slowly lifted his head.
His large, dark eyes, the same obsidian mirrors as Celeste’s, bypassed his father, bypassed his mother, and ignored the three older brothers entirely.
His gaze locked onto the tall, raven-haired woman standing five feet away from him.
Celeste looked down at the boy.
For the first time since she had stepped out of the command bunker in Sector Four, the clinical stillness of her internal monologue faltered.
She looked at his pale, delicate face, and suddenly, eleven years of blood, gunfire, and mercenary survival peeled away like a layer of frost.
She wasn’t ‘King of Hell’.
She wasn’t the feared apex predator of the underworld.
She was nine years old again, sitting on the sunlit porch of their old house, resting her cheek against her mother’s swollen abdomen.
She remembered the rhythmic, soothing beat of the unborn baby’s heart.
She remembered tapping her fingers against the skin and feeling the tiny, answering kick from within the womb.
She remembered whispering into the warmth: ‘Don’t worry, little one.
When you come out, big sister is going to take you to eat the best sugar-coated haws in the city.
Big sister will protect you forever.’
She had made that promise three days before she was sold into hell.