A Woman Worth Billions Dated the Wrong Brother novel Chapter 419

The ones who raised her

Jason POV

when Mr. Stait checked his phone again, I finally understood the expression on his face.

I’d seen it before.

Not on him.

On myself.

It was the same sick mixture of anger and fear I’d felt when Amber collapsed. The same helpless fury I’d felt when the doctors took her through doors I couldn’t follow her through. It wasn’t irritation because Jasmine had ignored orders. It wasn’t even the anger of a commander whose injured soldier had disappeared during an active investigation.

It was personal.

I thought back to the waiting room when Iris had handed me Jasmine’s letter. Mr. Stait hadn’t reacted like a superior discovering that one of his people had gone off mission. He’d immediately started pulling cameras, tracing routes and issuing orders with a kind of controlled urgency I recognized now because I’d spent the last several hours feeling it myself.

He’d been scared.

Noah had just told me Jasmine was safe, yet Mr. Stait was still checking his phone as though he needed constant proof of it.

I looked at him. “She’s more than one of your soldiers, isn’t she?”

Mr. Stait’s eyes lifted from the screen.

Mr. Asher glanced between us.

I continued quietly, “When we realized she was gone, you looked ready to tear the hospital apart looking for her. I thought you were furious because she’d disobeyed you.”

“I was furious.”

“I know.” I looked down at Amber’s hand inside mine. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

For a moment, Mr. Stait said nothing.

i

Then he put his phone away.

“Jasmine was eight when I adopted her.”

I stared at him.

“What?”

“Not formally in the traditional sense,” he explained. “There wasn’t one house, one mother and one father waiting for her. Her situation was complicated. So we did it differently.”

“We?”

“Me and several members of command.”

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I had heard Jasmine speak about people from different divisions before, but I’d always assumed they were Rentors, instructors or officers who had taken an interest in a gifted child.

Apparently I’d misunderstood completely.

“Different areas of command took responsibility for different parts of her life,” Mr. Stait continued. “She stayed with some of us at different times. We made sure she went to school, ate, trained properly and had somewhere safe to sleep. Someone attended meetings when the school called. Someone showed up when she was sick. Someone made sure she had birthdays even when she claimed she didn’t care about them.”

Mr. Asher’s expression softened.

“She grew up surrounded by soldiers, intelligence officers, medical personnel and commanders,” Mr. Stait said. ” Probably explains half of what’s wrong with her.”

Emory snorted.

Mr. Stait ignored him.

“She wasn’t passed around because nobody wanted her, Jason. She had several homes because all of us did.”

That landed differently.

I thought about Jasmine slipping out of the hospital, leaving Iris a letter because apparently that counted as responsible behavior in her mind. I thought about Mr. Stait’s face when he’d read it and realized she was gone.

I’d mistaken a father’s fear for a commander’s anger.

“So when you said find Jasmine…”

“I wasn’t looking for one of my soldiers.”

His voice was quieter now.

“I was looking for my kid.”

For several seconds, nobody said anything.

Then Emory looked down at his phone. “For the record, if she comes back with another bullet hole, I’m sedating her.”

Mr. Stait nodded. “I’ll authorize it.”

Despite everything, I almost smiled.

My gaze returned to Amber.

Families were strange things.

Mine had been built out of grandparents who found me after I’d forgotten who I was, children I chose before they ever called me Dad, a woman who married me and somehow became the center of everything, and two newborn sons waiting for their mother to wake up.

Jasmine’s had apparently been built out of an entire command structure that looked at one eight-year-old girl and collectively decided she would never be alone again.

Maybe that explained why she had followed Amber into danger so many times. 1

Jasmine understood family better than she thought she did.

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She had simply learned a different definition of it.

Yason.”

Something in Mr. Stait’s voice made me look back at him.

“What I just told you doesn’t leave this room.”

I frowned.

“Jasmine’s identity is sealed,” he continued. “Her history, the circumstances under which she came into our care, even most of the records from her childhood. None of it can be shared. Not publicly, not with the rest of the family, not even with people you trust unless Jasmine herself decides otherwise.”

Mr. Asher nodded immediately. Emory didn’t react at all, which made me suspect none of this was new information to him.

“You have my word,” I said.

Mr. Stait studied me for another moment before continuing.

“And there’s something else you need to understand. Jasmine isn’t her real name.”

I stared at him.

“What is?”

“We don’t know.”

That answer was worse.

Mr. Stait folded his arms. “We found her when she was eight years old during an operation on an abandoned island. She was alone, injured, terrified and surviving however she could. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t give us a name we could verify.”

“So you called her Jasmine?”

“We needed something to put on medical records while we figured out who she was. Several of us were involved in finding her and taking responsibility for her afterward, so we built the name from our initials.”

I looked toward the door Jasmine had walked through countless times as though I might somehow see her differently now.

Jasmine wasn’t the name she’d been born with.

It was the name given to her by the people who found her.

“Did you ever discover where she came from?”

Mr. Stait’s expression changed.

“Not conclusively. But we found evidence on that island, and after everything we’ve uncovered about the Vincents recently, some of those old pieces make considerably more sense.”

A cold feeling settled in my stomach.

“What kind of evidence?”

“Enough to give us reason to believe Jasmine wasn’t abandoned there.” His jaw tightened. “We believe she

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escaped.”

scaped what?