The Heiress He Underestimated novel Chapter 101

Xan thanked Andrew, promised him a bonus, and hung up. Then he sat in his car in the dark garage and tried to process what he’d just learned.

Sarah might not be guilty. The story she’d built her entire identity around, the victimhood that had justified everything she’d done and asked him to do, might be a lie. Or at least, not the whole truth.

And if Sarah wasn’t guilty, if she’d been set up, framed, used as a scapegoat for something bigger, then who was the real victim here?

Was it Sarah, locked away for five years for a crime she might not have committed?

Or was it Elera, carrying the guilt of whatever really happened that night, hiding behind masks and secret identities, never able to tell the truth?

Or was it both of them, just pawns in a game played by monsters like Kieran Nethys, who destroyed lives for profit and power?

Xan didn’t know. He didn’t know anything anymore. The foundation he’d built his world on was cracking, and he could feel himself falling through the fissures into something dark and unknown.

He thought about Sarah upstairs in his penthouse, probably already asleep with her pills and her delusions. He thought about Elera in her fortress by the sea nursing a dying man

And he thought about himself, caught between the woman he’d promised to avenge and the woman he was starting to realize he’d never stopped loving.

God help them all.

*

*

Back at the cliff house, Elera was getting ready for bed when her phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number.

“I know what really happened five years ago. I know the truth about Sarah’s parents. And I know your father was involved. We should talk. Tomorrow at a neutral location. Come alone. This is not a threat This is an offer to help you before everything explodes.”

No signature. No identifying information. Just an offer that could be a trap or could be the key to everything.

Elera stared at the message for a long time. Then she forwarded it to Frost with a single question: “Can you trace this?”

His response came back within minutes: “Working on it. Don’t respond. Don’t go anywhere alone. This smells like bait.”

Chapter 101 A Mysterious Message.

Finished

But what if it wasn’t bait? What if someone really did have information about that night, about her father’s involvement, about the truth that Sarah had twisted into her revenge fantasy?

Elera had always known her father was capable of terrible things. She’d never understood just how terrible until she’d seen the evidence of his embezzlement from her grandmother’s foundation. But murder? Covering up a crime? Framing a teenage girl for vehicular manslaughter?

That was a level of evil she’d never imagined. Even from him.

She thought about Sarah’s face at the gala. The pale, haunted look of someone who’d been broken and never healed. What if Sarah wasn’t evil? What if she was just damaged, used, manipulated by people who’d taken advantage of her trauma?

Elera knew what it was like to be used. She’d spent her whole life being someone’s tool, someone’s pawn. The only difference was she’d been smart enough and lucky enough to build her own power, to create her own options.

Sarah had never gotten that chance. She’d been locked away, drugged, told over and over that she was guilty, that she’d killed her own parents. What would that do to a person? How could anyone survive that and come out whole?

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