Chapter 8

Nora’s POV

"You have a family, Nora. You’re... you’re my sister, Nora."

The words hung in the air, heavy and unbelievable.

You are my sister Nora.

My brain scrambled to process the concept, but it felt like trying to grasp smoke with my bare hands. Me? The missing heiress of the Sinclair family? The woman who had spent the last eight years being treated like a servant in the Blackwell estate, told daily by Helena that I was a penniless nobody who should kiss the ground Adrian walked on? It felt like a cruel joke cooked up by a feverish mind.

I stared at Dominic, then back at Richard. The sheer absurdity of it made a bitter, breathless laugh escape my lips.

"No..." I shook my head, the sudden movement sending a sharp wave of pain down my neck. "No, this is wrong. You have the wrong person. I'm an orphan. I was left in a basket at the door of the St. Jude Children's Home on a frozen night. I spent my whole life with nothing. I don't... I can't be a Sinclair. The Sinclairs are royalty. I'm just Nora."

"You are not just anyone, my child," Richard said, his voice dropping into a desperate register as he reached up with a hand that shook uncontrollably. He didn't touch me—he seemed terrified of scaring me away—but his fingers hovered near the left side of my collarbone. "Look at me, Nora. Look at your father."

"I don't have a father," I whispered, the words tasting like ash. "I never had anyone."

"Twenty-nine years ago, when you were born, your mother held you for only ten minutes before she passed away," Richard wept quietly, tears streaming freely down his weathered cheeks, unashamed in front of his eldest son. "here, just beneath your left ear, stretching down toward your neck… you were born with a very distinct mark. A faint crescent birthmark in the shape of a half-moon. Your mother smiled when she saw it. She called you her little moonbeam."

My breath hitched in my chest.

Instinctively, my hand flew up to my neck, my fingertips pressing against the small skin beneath my ear. I had spent years hiding it beneath collars and foundation because Helena Blackwell used to sneer at it, calling it an ugly, low-class blemish that ruined my neck. I had spent eight years feeling ashamed of it.

"You... you know about the mark?" I choked out.

"I drew it from memory every single night for twenty-nine years," Richard said, reaching into his inner breast pocket and pulling out a worn, frayed wallet. With trembling fingers, he pulled out an old photograph and held it out to me.

Through my blurred vision, I looked down at the photo. It was a picture of a radiant woman with high cheekbones and soft, gentle eyes—eyes that looked uncannily like mine—holding a tiny baby wrapped in a pink blanket. Swept back from the baby's tiny neck was that exact same mark.

Before I could process the image, the doors of the room clicked open. A tall man in a white lab coat stepped into the room, flanked by two guards dressed in black suits. He carried a folder clamped tightly under his arm.

"Mr. Sinclair," the doctor said, bowing his head respectfully toward Richard. "The emergency processing is complete. We ran the samples three times, as requested."

The room fell dead quiet. The only sound was the steady, rhythmic beep-beep-beep of my heart monitor.

Dominic stood up from his knee, stepping alongside his father as the doctor approached the bed and opened the folder. He pulled out a white document.

He laid the paper directly over my lap.

My eyes darted across the page, until they locked onto the bold black text near the bottom. The paper blurred before my eyes as hot tears finally spilled down my face, leaving burning trails down my bruised cheeks.

It was real. It wasn't a dream. "Why...?" A sob tore out of my chest, harsh and ragged, shaking my entire body. I buried my face in my hands, weeping uncontrollably as years of buried agony burst through the dam I had built around my heart. "Why didn't you come for me sooner? Do you have any idea... do you have any idea what my life was like?!"

Richard let out a broken cry, wrapping his arms around my shaking shoulders, pulling me gently against his chest. For the first time in my memory, a father's arms held me. He didn't care that I was broken beyond repair.

"I'm sorry, my baby," Richard sobbed into my hair, holding me tightly, his own tears soaking into my blanket. "I am so, so sorry. I looked everywhere. I tore through continents, but the woman who stole you erased your tracks so deeply... I failed you, Nora. I failed your mother, and I failed you."

"I thought... I thought nobody wanted me," I cried, clutching the lapels of his expensive suit with my pale, scraped fingers. "When I sat on that cold doorstep as a child, when the other kids were adopted and I was left behind, I thought my parents threw me away because I was useless. And then... then I met him, and I thought if I worked hard enough, if I was obedient enough, if I served his mother and took care of our child without complaining, someone would finally love me!"

Dominic closed his eyes tightly, turning his head away as a single tear escaped his eye, his hands clenching into tight fists at his sides.

"I gave them eight years!" I screamed through my tears, the suffocating humiliation of my marriage pouring out of me.

"You are not alone," Dominic said, stepping forward, his voice cracking with a fierce intensity as he placed his hand over mine. "You will never be alone again, Nora. Not as long as a single Sinclair is still breathing."

I wept until my lungs burned, until I had no tears left to give, draining eight years of rejection and grief into the chest of the father who had spent twenty-nine years searching for me.

After a long time, the shaking of my shoulders began to slow. Richard stayed right beside me, gently wiping the hair from my sticky forehead with a soft handkerchief, holding a glass of water to my lips until my breathing finally evened out.

I took a shaky breath, swallowing hard, and used the sleeve of my hospital gown to dry my eyes. A strange, hollow calm settled over me.

"I'm happy," I whispered, looking between Richard and Dominic, offering them a frail, exhausted smile. "I really am. Knowing that my mother loved me before she died... knowing that my father searched for me... it fixes something inside me that had been broken for a very long time. Thank you for finding me."

Richard smiled through his red eyes, pressing a warm kiss to the back of my hand. "My dear..."

"But..." I swallowed against the lump forming in my throat, looking down at my bandaged hands. "I'm afraid you found me too late."

Richard froze. Dominic’s brows pulled together in confusion. "What do you mean, too late?"

"I have a rare, terminal illness. The doctor told me... they told me I only have three months left to live. Maybe less."

Silence descended upon the room once more, but it wasn't the silence of grief—it was a silence of unshakeable confidence. To my shock, Richard didn't burst into tears. Dominic didn't look despairing. Instead, the doctor stepped forward, clearing his throat gently.

"Miss Sinclair," the doctor said, pulling a new set of medical scans from his folder. "The diagnosis you received from that local clinic was incomplete and entirely inaccurate."

I blinked, stunned. "What?"

"The clinic you visited used outdated diagnostic equipment that misidentified a complex, highly specific cellular enzyme deficiency as an untreatable terminal disease," the doctor explained, turning a digital screen toward me. "Your condition is indeed extraordinarily rare—it occurs in less than one in ten million people. However, it is not terminal. It requires a highly specialized surgical procedure combined with targeted gene-therapy blockers."

My heart did a flip inside my chest. "It's... it's treatable?"

"It is entirely curable," the doctor corrected. "The only reason that local hospital deemed it 'terminal' is because there are only two medical teams in the entire world with the technology and expertise to perform the procedure."

Richard turned to me, his eyes burning with the formidable, unstoppable authority of the patriarch of Sinclair Holdings.

"And those two medical teams," Richard said softly, a sharp, cold edge under his tone, "are currently on a private jet, flying straight to this hospital as we speak. I bought their entire research institute an hour ago. You are going to live, Nora. You are going to live a long, beautiful, healthy life, and no one will ever hurt you again."

I sat frozen, my mouth slightly open, my mind reeling. In the span of a single hour, I gone from a dying, abandoned wife waiting to fade away to the cherished daughter of an empire, surrounded by world-class medical teams dedicated solely to keeping me alive.

"There is one more thing, little sister," Dominic said, a rare smile finally breaking through his stern, disciplined face as he tapped his tablet screen. "You didn't just gain a father today."

I looked up at him. "What do you mean?"

"When our mother died, she didn't just leave behind Richard and me," Dominic explained. "You have three more older brothers."

"Three... more?" My voice was barely a whisper.

"Four boys and one girl—that was always our family," Richard smiled fondly, reaching up to gently pat my head. "Dominic is your eldest brother, the second head of Sinclair Holdings. But you also have Sebastian, your second brother. He’s an international top model—a bit arrogant and far too loud, but he’s been tearing his hair out in Paris since we received the DNA results."

"And the twins," Dominic added, his eyes warming. "Ruphael, your third brother, who is a bestselling author. He’s quiet, but he’s already cancelled his entire book tour across Asia to come here. And Rafael, the youngest twin—a professional motor racer. He nearly crashed his car on the track in Italy when I called him with the news. He abandoned his race mid-lap and hijacked our jet."

Four older brothers. A CEO, a top model, a bestselling author, and a motor racer. An entire family of powerful, protective men who had spent their lives waiting for the sister they had lost.

Richard didn't even turn around. He simply looked at me with an overwhelming warmth, his eyes shining with pure fatherly pride.

"Listen," Richard said softly, holding my hand tight. "Your brothers are coming home."