Chapter 5 - The Investigator's Report
True to his word, within fifty minutes, Victor Thorne's encrypted digital file landed on Adrian's private tablet.
Adrian sat down at the edge of the king-sized bed, his thumb hovering over the screen. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. He unlocked the device with a biometric scan and opened the encrypted PDF.
The document was comprehensive, detailing every facet of Lucía Herrera's existence.
Name: Lucía Elena Herrera.
Age: 26.
Current Residence: A small, rented one-room apartment on the industrial outskirts of the city.
Employment: Grand Astoria Hotel, Tier-Three Housekeeping (employed for six months).
Family status: Unmarried, single mother.
Adrian's eyes scanned down the page, skipping past utility bills and past employment records at diner counters and laundromats, searching for the entry that mattered most.
Child: Mateo Herrera.
Date of Birth: Approximately eight months prior.
Place of Birth: St. Jude Community Hospital.
Adrian scrolled further, reading the section concerning Lucía's background prior to her arrival in the city. She had moved here three years ago from a coastal town two hundred miles south, following a devastating personal upheaval that the report described only as 'family estrangement and sudden financial ruin.'
Then, Adrian's eyes locked onto a specific paragraph near the bottom of the page, accompanied by a scanned document from a local clinic.
Note on maternity records: Hospital intake logs from St. Jude Community Hospital indicate that Lucía Herrera registered as the primary guardian of the infant Mateo following an emergency adoption transfer managed through a private, confidential legal intermediary—
Adrian stopped breathing.
An adoption transfer?
He zoomed in on the document, his eyes tracing the name of the legal firm that had overseen the transfer three years ago, right around the time his own world had collapsed into ash. It was the exact same legal firm that his family's estate had used for confidential settlements and trust management.
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
It couldn't be. The lawyers had assured him. They had told him that everything was handled, that the tragedy was absolute, that there were no survivors to tie him to the wreckage of that terrible night.
Or had they lied to him? Had someone within his own inner circle — someone who wanted control of the Cole family fortune — engineered a deception so deep, so cruel, that it had hidden the truth from him for three agonizing years?
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Adrian slammed the tablet down onto the mattress. His breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. The anger that surged through him was not the cold, calculated fury he used in the boardroom; it was a primal, blinding rage that burned hot and fierce.
He stood up so fast the floor seemed to sway beneath his feet. He had to see her. He had to look Lucía Herrera in the eye and find out where she had gotten that baby, and why the legal machinery of his own empire was tangled up in her past.
