Free Web NovelChapter 27: Chapter 26 Holding the Fuse
The private fitting room at St. Vittoria looked more like a high-end designer boutique than a school office. Plush velvet chairs, gold-rimmed mirrors, and racks of perfectly tailored navy and white uniforms lined the walls.
The headmistress gestured to a middle-aged woman holding a tablet. "This is Signora Bianchi, our head registrar. She will handle the Princess’s enrollment package."
I winced at the title, but before I could correct her, Signora Bianchi stepped forward with a smile. "Mr. Monroe, would you like the standard package or the executive tier for the Princess?"
"Standard," I said immediately.
"Executive," Laziel countered without even looking up from his phone.
Signora Bianchi’s fingers flew across her tablet. "Excellent. The executive tier includes six custom-tailored seasonal uniforms, the monogrammed school bag, a private tablet, and full enrollment in our primary electives: equestrian lessons, classical piano, conversational French, and competitive swimming."
My head started spinning. "Horse-riding? She’s four! She can barely ride a scooter without scraping her knees."
Laziel didn’t even blink. "Add advanced mandarin."
"Right away, sir," the registrar murmured.
I leaned back in my chair, staring at the ceiling. He is completely insane.
Meanwhile, a tailor was kneeling on the floor, carefully measuring Anastelle’s inseam with a tape measure. Anastelle was standing perfectly still, but her eyes were darting around the room until they finally landed on Laziel, who was leaning against a table with his arms crossed.
She pointed a sticky finger right at him. "Snack Man is grumpy."
The tailor froze mid-measurement. The headmistress went entirely pale, her eyes darting to Laziel as if expecting him to order a firing squad.
"Anastelle, shh," I warned.
But my daughter wasn’t finished. She looked at the terrified tailor and wrinkled her nose. "He always smiles like this."
She clamped her lips together, pulling the corners of her mouth slightly backward in a ridiculous, exaggerated imitation of Laziel’s tiny, almost-imperceptible twitch from the elevator yesterday.
The registrar let out a strangled cough, trying to disguise a laugh as a throat-clear. I bit the inside of my cheek so hard.
Laziel slowly lowered his phone. His expression didn’t change but his eyes locked onto my daughter. "Are you finished?"
"Yes," Anastelle chirped, completely unfazed by his aura.
A few minutes later, Signora Bianchi presented the final invoice on her tablet. I leaned over to look at the screen, and my breath instantly caught in my throat.
Thirty-five thousand euros. For one school year. For a toddler.
"Absolutely not," I blurted out, reaching for the tablet. "This is ridiculous. We are leaving right now—"
Before my fingers could even touch the glass, Laziel casually whipped out a black card and tapped it against the registrar’s terminal.
Approved.
I whipped my head around to glare at him. "Do you even know how much that just cost?"
"No," Laziel said flatly, sliding the card back into his wallet.
"You can’t just throw money at everything!" I snapped, the frustration bubbling over. "Stop buying things for her. You’re confusing her."
Before Laziel could speak.
"Everything is complete, Mr. Monroe. We only require the final emergency contact information and the primary signature."
I took a step forward. "List my number for the emergency contact."
"Mine," Laziel said.
I turned on him. "Excuse me? I am her mother. If something happens, they need to call me."
"Mine," Laziel repeated, his voice dropping into that flat, unyielding tone that left no room for negotiation. "If there is an emergency, my security detail will move faster than a city taxi, Miss Brenner. Don’t let your pride compromise her safety."
I hated him. I hated him because, once again, he made me feel completely powerless.
The headmistress quickly slid the enrollment document across the desk, pointing to a line at the bottom. "We only need one signature here to finalize everything. The Guardian’s Signature."
I reached out to take the pen from the holder.
But Laziel’s hand got there first. Without a single second of hesitation, he scribbled his name across the line.
"...What are you doing?" I whispered.
The headmistress smiled politely as she accepted the documents.
"Congratulations, Mr. Monroe. Princess Anastelle’s enrollment is now complete."
Congratulations.
The word echoed unpleasantly inside my head.
I couldn’t hear anything else.
I couldn’t even feel the room around me.
My eyes drifted toward Anastelle.
Instead of running to me to show off her new blue dress, she ran straight toward Laziel, happily wrapping both arms around his leg, giggling about something only she found funny.
He didn’t hug her back.
He never did.
He simply looked down at her with that same unreadable expression before allowing her to cling to him anyway.
A few days ago...
She wouldn’t let go of my hand.
Now...
She reached for his.
Was he trying to take my daughter away from me?
He had given her everything I could never afford. He handed to her without blinking.
Children didn’t understand manipulation. They understood kindness.
Anastelle is going to love him more, a terrifying voice whispered inside my head.
I had to get out. I couldn’t just think about moving across the city anymore. I needed to find a way to take my daughter and flee from this entire country before the Monroes took her away from me permanently.
.......
I thought my day couldn’t get any worse, but the universe apparently loved proving me wrong.
By the time we got back to the mansion, Anastelle was knocked out completely.
I was just drifting off into a dreamless sleep when my phone vibrated.
Oh come one. It was just 1:04 AM.
A text from an unsaved number, though I already knew the freezing tone behind it: Come to my study immediately.
I groaned, burying my face in the pillow. Won’t this man ever let me breathe?
Anger quickly replaced my exhaustion. I threw off the sheets and stormed out of the room. He was doing this on purpose. He wanted to remind me at every hour of the night that my schedule, my time, and my life belonged to him now.
As I approached the doors of his study. I prepared myself to demand what could possibly be so urgent at one in the morning.
But before my hand could touch the handle, handle, a muffled voice from inside stopped me dead in my tracks.
The door wasn’t fully latched. It was cracked open just a tiny fraction—barely a centimeter.
"Sir, this is the deep background check," a man’s voice said —likely his right-hand man, the head of his security detail. "Everything you wanted to know about Miss Brenner. Her past, her connections, and the father of her child."
My heart stopped beating.
I instinctively pressed my back against the wall next to the doorframe, my hand flying up to cover my mouth to stop a gasp from escaping.
"You won’t believe what we unearthed," the man continued.
He dug into it. If he opened that folder right now, everything would be completely over.
The truth would come out. Anastelle wasn’t just some random little girl from a broken neighborhood. She was a Monroe. She was Helix’s biological daughter—and since Helix was currently trying and failing to have kids, my tiny four-year-old was the first and only grandchild of the Monroe empire. The sole heir to a multi-billion-dollar dynasty.
If Laziel found out she was his niece, he would never let us leave this country. He would take her, legally erase me, and wrap her in the golden cage of his family name permanently.
Inside the room, a rustle of paper signaled that Laziel was reaching for the folder.
No, no, no—
Suddenly, a ringtone.
I pressed myself even harder against the wall, shrinking into the shadows of the doorframe. Inside, the rustling stopped.
"Speak," Laziel said. He listened for a second, before his chair scraped against the floor. "I’ll be there in twenty minutes."
Footsteps began moving toward the door. Laziel was leaving to take the call, and his right-hand man was stepping in line right behind him.
I panicked and scrambled backward, slipping into a pillar a few feet down the hallway.
Laziel walked out, the phone pressed tightly to his ear, his eyes focused entirely ahead as he strode down the corridor. But his right-hand man stopped dead in his tracks right outside the doorway.
His head tilting slightly to the side. He didn’t see me behind the pillar, but his instincts were sharp—he could clearly feel that someone had just been standing by the door watching them. He scanned the empty, shadowed hallway for five seconds.
Finally, the man grunted, assuming it was just the draft from the air conditioning, and turned to jog after his boss.
The moment their footsteps faded completely into the distance, I sprinted out from behind the pillar. The study doors were still slightly ajar. I slipped inside, closing them softly behind me, my eyes locking onto the desk in the center of the room.
There it lay.
I crossed the room and snatched it up. I flipped it open under the dim light of the desk lamp, and my breath hitched.
Old paparazzi photos from five years ago stared back at me.
There were grainy shots of me entering the gates of Helix’s high-profile wedding. Photos of us together from months before that—back when I was naive enough to think he actually loved me.
The proof was right here.
If I took this paper right now, it wouldn’t solve anything. Laziel’s man was the one who had dug up this information. If the folder suddenly went missing, they would know instantly that I had stolen it. He would just order another search, dig even deeper, or worse—the right-hand man would tell him.
I was standing in the dark, holding the fuse to a bomb that was seconds away from destroying my daughter’s life.
