“Don’t believe me, cousin?” she says, leaning forward and giving the folder a hard shove so that it sails right across the table to me. “See for yourself.”
Cousin? Fuck that.
My hand slams down on the papers as men come at me from all angles, wanting to see the papers for themselves. It’s fucking chaos, and the closer the other men move in, the faster Cruz and Grayson move behind me.
I sit down, allowing space for people to see over my shoulder, and flip open the folder to find a birth certificate with Ember’s name on it. Every single detail checks out, and as I pick it up to look even closer, Harlen snatches it right out of my hand. “It’s doctored,” he spits, instantly throwing the paper back down and disregarding it as trash. “Michael didn’t have a kid with that whore. You’re a liar.”
Ember raises her brow, glaring at Harlen again. “That’s the way you want to play this? Name-calling my birth mother?” she scoffs in disgust, almost as though she was expecting a mature response from the men at this table, but if that’s the case, she clearly hasn’t been paying attention. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to play along and let you know that your mother was a cheap farmer’s daughter and a fraud who should never have been accepted into a Dynasty marriage all those years ago, but I’m sure you knew that.”
Harlen’s face glows with anger but Grayson steps into him, gripping his arm and forcing him back to his seat while I keep my hard stare on Ember. “I’m going to need a little more proof than a piece of shitty paper,” I tell her with a fake grin. “You understand, don’t you? After all, you’ve been lying to me since the day I met you.”
Ember scoffs. “It’s not my fault that you missed all the signs,” she mutters before holding her arm out. “And for the record, I’d be more than happy to supply a blood sample.”
Every word that comes out of her mouth grinds against my nerves. How the fuck could she lie to me like this? Knowing what her mother has been doing to me all these months … fuck, years. She’s been following me from home to home, keeping a close eye on me and waiting for the right time to strike.
This whole thing is a fucking joke.
“Was any of it real?” I question. “Months of friendship, or were you just keeping me close to get information to feed back to Paris?”
Ember just smiles and my blood runs cold. “At first maybe,” she tells me, “but your endless whining and tough girl act quickly got boring. Don’t get me wrong, out of respect I attempted to tell you a few times, but you’ve been screening my calls and not giving me the chance to talk. I didn’t want to blindside you like this, but you gave me no choice. I was able to get past you killing Jacob, but then you had my father killed and I decided that I just didn’t give a shit anymore.”
Grayson and Cruz shuffle in closer to my sides, ready to catch me when I inevitably launch myself across the table to strangle the bitch. “You’re working with her,” I accuse, now realizing that her relationship with Jacob Scardoni was never bullshit after all. They were truly together the whole time, and the bullshit Jacob said about being with her just to get information out of me was his way of taking the spotlight off her, covering their tracks, and making sure their bullshit plans could go on. Well, fuck them. Fuck them all.
My comment gets the attention of every last person at the table, and their heads snap up to Ember, waiting impatiently for her response as I watch Carver out of the corner of my eye, silently shaking with anger and clutching onto the side of the table to keep himself from marching over to Ember and kicking her bitch ass.
“No,” Ember says, completely unaware of Carver sitting way too close. “I am innocent in all of this. I haven’t done a damn thing against you, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy building a relationship with my mother, and if she just happened to tell me about her less than thrilling experiences with her niece, then I am all ears.”
“You’re a piece of shit,” I spit, the anger and betrayal washing over me in waves. “Don’t be fooled, every single person at this table knows your mother is a fraud. They know who she is and she will never get her hands on Dynasty. Do you really think that the men who sit around this table are going to give it up for anything? You haven’t got a chance in hell. Every time that you claim your father’s name to get a foot inside Dynasty, I’m just going to push you right back again.”