Page 98 of Rescuing Aria
“And then he found her,” Wolfe’s voice hardens. “Threatened her parents. Threatened me. Threatened you. Threatened to use his connections to ensure she’d never see you again.” His gaze shifts to my father. “But there was a complication by then, wasn’t there, Marcus?”
My father’s face has gone pale beneath his tan, jaw clenched so tight I can see a muscle jumping in his cheek.
“She was pregnant,” Wolfe says simply. “And neither of us could be certain who the father was.”
The room spins slightly. The crystal chandelier fragments into a thousand points of light, the silk wallpaper swirls with its damask pattern. I grip the edge of the table, anchoring myself.
“You might be my daughter, Aria,” Wolfe says quietly. “Rebecca believed you were. Said she could see it in your eyes from the moment you were born.”
My father explodes. There’s no other word for it. The careful control shatters completely, revealing something monstrous beneath. He strains against his restraints with such force that the chair creaks.
“You delusional bastard!” he roars. “You think you can steal my daughter the way you tried to steal my wife? Aria is MINE!”
The possessive pronoun lands like a blow. Not “my child” but “mine”—a thing owned, a possession.
The girl drops a glass, startled by my father’s outburst. It shatters on the marble floor, the sound like a gunshot in the tension-filled room. She immediately drops to her knees, frantically gathering the shards with trembling hands.
“Leave it,” Wolfe snaps at her, but there’s no real heat in his voice. His attention remains fixed on my father, whose rage has transformed his familiar features into those of a stranger.
“I should have ended you years ago,” my father says, voice low and vicious. “When you first started sniffing around Rebecca. Should have buried you in the same hole as your whore mother.”
Wolfe doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he smiles coldly. “And there he is. The real Marcus Holbrook, ladies and gentlemen. Not the philanthropist. Not the grieving widower. Not the doting father. Just a vicious, entitled little boy who breaks his toys rather than sharing them.”
The girl has retreated to the far corner, glass forgotten. Her wide eyes dart between the men, assessing the threat level, calculating escape routes. It’s the instinctive response of someone who has learned that male rage typically precedes violence.
“Enough,” I say, my voice steadier than I feel. “I want to understand what happened to my mother. How she really died.”
“Heart failure,” my father insists, but the rage has made him careless. His eyes shift away—the tell I’ve seen when he’s lying to business associates.
“The night your mother died,” Wolfe says quietly, “she called me. She’d finally gathered enough evidence of Marcus’s operations overseas. Proof that Holbrook Medical Technologies was harvesting organs from ‘donors’ who rarely survived the procedures.”
My stomach turns. Holbrook Medical Technologies—my father’s legacy. Revolutionary transplant techniques. Life-saving innovations. Built on death?
“She was going to expose everything,” Wolfe continues. “She’d made copies of documents, recordings of conversations. She was ready to take you and run.”
“Lies,” my father spits, but his eyes are wild now, darting between Wolfe and me.
“I told her to wait. That I’d come for her the next day,” Wolfe’s voice catches slightly. “By morning, she was dead. Fell down the stairs. Sudden heart failure. Got dizzy andtripped.How convenient.”
The implication sits heavy in the air between us.
“That’s absurd,” my father says, but the denial lacks conviction. “I was out of town when it happened. There are witnesses.”
“Yes,” Wolfe agrees smoothly. “Your alibi was perfect. Just like everything else you orchestrate.”
He slides another folder toward me. This one is marked with the Holbrook Medical Technologies logo. I open it with numb fingers.
Financial reports. Shipping manifests. Patient records from clinics in Thailand, Nigeria, Honduras. Mortality rates hidden in footnotes. Payments to families labeled as “compensatory settlements.”
“Your father’s real business,” Wolfe explains. “High-end medical technology built on a foundation of harvested organs from people desperate enough to sell them—except they don’t survive the ‘donations’ as promised. The perfect captive donor pool: poor, desperate, and disposable.”
The clinical language makes the horror worse somehow. These aren’t statistics—they’re people. Hundreds of them, reduced to “donors” in a spreadsheet. Lives exchanged for medical advancements and profit margins.
“Thousands of lives saved,” my father counters, his voice steadying as he falls back on familiar justifications. “Revolutionary techniques that wouldn’t exist otherwise. The greater good requires sacrifice.”
“But not your sacrifice,” I find my voice. “Father, how could you? These people had no choice.” I don’t know that, but the pictures tell a story of poverty and choices only the desperate make.
Something flickers in my father’s eyes—surprise that I’m not accepting his explanation. That I’m seeing through him, perhaps for the first time.
