All Chapters of One Night with My Ex-Fiancé’s Ruthless Brother: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

(Keyla POV) The phrase in the forensic addendum was *substituted minor sample.* Three words. Standard forensic language. The kind that appeared in chain-of-custody documentation because chain-of-custody documentation needed precise terms for what it was describing, and *substituted minor sample* was precise. I kept staring at it until the words stopped looking legal and started looking like what they were. Someone had found, prepared, or taken a biological sample from a minor child. They had placed it in a vial. They had transported it to a clinic on a secondary road in a city where Leo had gone for a medical appointment with his mother's sleeve in his fist, and they had swapped it for whatever Leo had contributed, and they had sealed it back up and sent it to a laboratory to produce a result. The sample that was tested had come from a child. Just not mine. I was still in Castillo's office. Most of the meeting had dispersed — the formal part was done, the addendum was filed, th

(Keyla POV) The message arrived through counsel because even kindness had rules now. Priscilla forwarded it at eight-fourteen in the morning with a note: *Received through mediator's office. Addressed to Leon Tamara. Draxler Churchill requests it be passed through you first, your discretion on delivery.* I read it on my phone before I got out of bed. One sentence. Printed, not handwritten — which was a choice, because printed meant Leo could read it himself if he wanted to. *I stayed. I will keep waiting.* I held the phone for a moment. Then I got up. --- Leo was eating breakfast when I brought it up. He was doing the thing where he ate cereal and arranged the remaining cereal into a pattern simultaneously, which meant the eating was secondary and the thinking was primary. "There's a message," I said. "It came through the lawyer's office. It's from Draxler." He looked up. "Do you want to hear it?" He considered this with the seriousness he brought to permissions — not *yes

(Marcus POV) The clinic had not recorded the courier. It had recorded the money. Marcus had the clinic's financial ledger through the court order — obtained on the same authorization that had pulled the security camera footage request, expanded after Castillo filed the criminal referral documentation. The ledger covered twelve months of operating transactions, and he'd been working through it since seven that morning. Most of the entries were what a community health clinic's ledger looked like: supply orders, staff costs, utility payments, the routine accounting of a small facility that ran on foundation funding and grant cycles. The entry from the DNA collection day was not routine. It appeared in the *Special Services* column — a catch-all category that the ledger used for ad hoc arrangements, the things that didn't fit the standard budget lines. The amount was specific in the way that medical handling fees were specific: not a round number, not a flat rate, but the precise fi

(Keyla POV) Leo brought the paper monster drawing to the psychologist appointment. He carried it in his backpack — I didn't know it was there until Dr. Osei asked him to take out anything he'd brought, the way she started all her sessions, making the room familiar before the conversation got to anything that mattered. He pulled it out and unfolded it and set it on the low table between them with the specific deliberateness of someone presenting evidence. Dr. Osei looked at it. "I made this," Leo said. "After the first test. That's what the box looked like." She studied the teeth, the label, the handwriting at the top. "The paper monster." "Yes." He sat back in his chair with the self-possession of a child who had been in this room before and had decided it was safe. "The test lied." "I heard that," Dr. Osei said. "Do you want to tell me what you understand about what happened?" Leo had thought about this. I could tell from the way he answered — the phrasing was more prepared t

(Marcus POV) Marcus rode with the box like it was a bomb with paperwork. Not literally — he was in the second vehicle, the escort car that followed the primary courier at close distance, with the live tracking feed open on his tablet and the chain-of-custody form on his lap and the contact number for Dr. Farrow's associate saved as a quick-dial in case anything changed between the collection facility's exit and the laboratory's loading dock. Nothing was going to change. He had made very specific arrangements to ensure nothing changed. Two independent couriers, neither of whom had any prior connection to the case, selected through Castillo's vetting process from a list of four certified medical transport operators. They'd been briefed separately, under documentation, on the collection, the route, the mandatory no-deviation policy, and the two designated stop allowances — a fuel break if needed, with live photo documentation, or a traffic delay with timestamp. Everything else was a