Part 3
The air in the restaurant’s private dining room seemed to have thinned. Henri Delmas’s words floated above them, toxic, heavy with a barely veiled threat. Gabriel looked at the old man—this friend of his late father, this mentor who had guided him through the twists and turns of high finance—and saw nothing but a monster with familiar features.
“A genetic anomaly?” Gabriel repeated, his jaw clenched tightly enough to shatter his teeth. “What are you talking about, you sick bastard?”
Henri offered a contemptuous smile, adjusting the collar of his jacket. “Did you really think your father’s real estate genius was born from nothing? That our dominance over the European market was built on mere good intuition?”
Élodie did not give Henri the time to continue. Primal, absolute maternal instinct took over. She grabbed the boys’ coats from a chair. “Adrien, Léo. We are leaving. Right now.” The twins, sensing the panic in their mother’s voice, ran over. Léo, with his uniquely striking grey eyes, stared at Henri for a moment. The old man held the child’s gaze, and for the very first time, a flicker of pure terror crossed the advisor’s pupils.
“Block the door,” Henri ordered, his voice suddenly high-pitched as he addressed the two bodyguards in dark suits waiting in the hallway. “They must not leave this establishment. I need to make a medical call for Mr. Montferrand; he is having a delusional episode.”
Camille, still sobbing, shrank back against the wall, terrified by the turn of events.
Gabriel did not hesitate for a fraction of a second. He seized a heavy crystal water carafe and smashed it violently against the edge of the table. The sound of shattering glass froze the guards. “The first one who comes near my wife and my sons, I’ll slit his throat,” roared Gabriel, brandishing the jagged shard.
The words “my wife” echoed through the room. It took Élodie’s breath away, but she didn’t stop. “I am the CEO of this group!” Gabriel shouted at the guards. “I am the one who pays your salaries! Move aside immediately!”
Confused, the henchmen exchanged a glance and slowly stepped out of the way. Gabriel wrapped his arms around Élodie and the twins, forming a human shield, and guided them toward the exit. “You lose everything if you walk out that door, Gabriel!” Henri screamed behind them, finally losing his legendary composure. “The empire will collapse! You’ll end up ruined!”
“I already lost everything five years ago,” Gabriel replied without looking back. “Today, I’m taking back what is mine.”
An hour later, Gabriel’s armored Mercedes was tearing down a country road plunged in darkness, heading toward the Chevreuse Valley. He hadn’t taken Élodie and the children back to his hotel, nor to his own manor in Saint-Cloud—it was too exposed. He was driving them to a renovated old barn, a property bought under the name of a shell company whose existence even Henri knew nothing about.
In the back, the twins had fallen asleep, exhausted by the tension. Élodie stared at the passing scenery, her face set.
“Élodie…” Gabriel began, his voice broken with guilt. “I… I don’t know how to ask for your forgiveness. I never saw that letter. I never…”
“Be quiet, Gabriel,” she cut him off sharply, without looking at him. “Don’t apologize. Not now. Apologies won’t fix five years of tears, nor the fact that I had to give birth alone while you paraded around with Camille in magazines. Right now, the only thing that matters to me is what that psychopath meant by ‘genetic anomaly.’ Why target my children?”
Gabriel gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I don’t know. But we’re going to find out tonight.”
When they arrived at the property—an isolated place surrounded by forests—Gabriel barricaded the doors and activated a signal jammer. While Élodie put the boys to bed in an upstairs room, Gabriel opened a safe hidden behind a wooden panel. He pulled out an encrypted computer and a satellite phone. He dialed a number.
“Marc? It’s Gabriel. Code Red. I need you to infiltrate Henri Delmas’s private servers. Yes, the tower at La Défense. I want everything. His offshore bank statements, his correspondence with the Beaux-Arts clinic, and look for a file linked to my father or a medical secret. Do it now, he’s probably trying to destroy everything.”
Marc was the only man Gabriel trusted implicitly, a cybersecurity genius who deeply detested Henri.
During three agonizing hours of waiting, Élodie and Gabriel sat in the living room, emotionally miles apart, yet united solely by fear. Élodie told him everything. The falsified medical tests, the nurses who looked at her with pity, the doctor who announced her alleged absolute infertility with clinical coldness. Gabriel listened, his face bathed in silent tears, realizing the sheer scale of the manipulation that had destroyed the woman of his life.
At three in the morning, Gabriel’s computer emitted a sharp beep. Marc had just sent a heavily encrypted file named “File M – Foundation.”
Gabriel opened it and began to read, Élodie leaning over his shoulder. What they discovered surpassed their darkest nightmares.
“My God…” Gabriel murmured, turning pale. “My father… wasn’t the founder.”
The file contained forged birth certificates, crossed-out psychiatric reports, and the original will of Gabriel’s grandfather. Gabriel’s father was not an only child. He had a twin brother named Arthur. Arthur was the true genius of the family, the visionary architect who had designed the revolutionary plans that made the group’s fortune. But Arthur had been born with a rare genetic mutation, Waardenburg Syndrome Type 4, which manifested as unreal, translucent grey eyes, and in his case, was accompanied by severe neurodivergence.
Henri Delmas, then an ambitious young lawyer, and Gabriel’s father, consumed by jealousy, had plotted together. They had Arthur committed to a Swiss psychiatric clinic under a false identity, forcing him to draw and produce patents that they then appropriated. They had literally kept him in intellectual slavery.
But the grandfather, before dying, had developed doubts. His will stipulated that 80% of the financial empire’s shares were locked in an untouchable trust, managed by Henri as a temporary trustee. This trust could only be unlocked and transferred on one condition: that a direct descendant present the same genetic signature as Arthur—proof that the lineage of the “true” creator was not extinct.
“Henri has been robbing the group for thirty years,” Élodie realized, horrified. “He uses the trust funds as the trustee. If an heir with that genetic makeup is born, that heir becomes the absolute majority owner on the day of their birth, and Henri’s accounts are audited. He would go to prison for embezzling billions.”
Gabriel frantically scrolled through the pages. “That’s why he orchestrated my meeting with Camille. Camille comes from a family whose family tree was ‘vetted.’ He wanted to make sure I never had a child with you, because you…”
Gabriel opened a sub-folder containing Élodie’s family tree, thoroughly researched by Henri’s detectives years earlier. “Your great-grandmother was a Montferrand. A distant cousin. The crossing of our DNA…”
“…awakened the recessive gene,” Élodie whispered, placing her hands over her mouth. “Léo. His grey eyes. He is the spitting image of Arthur. And he is a twin.”
“Léo is the rightful heir to the trust. And Henri knows it. If he found out about your pregnancy, he knew there was a risk. That’s why he rigged your fertility tests. He wanted to convince you that you were sterile so you would leave me, without anyone asking questions. When you miraculously got pregnant right before our separation, and the lawyer tipped him off… Henri must have panicked.”
The monstrosity of the conspiracy was absolute. Henri Delmas hadn’t just destroyed their marriage; he had imprisoned a man his entire life to steal his genius, embezzled billions, and was ready to harm five-year-old children to protect his secret.
Suddenly, a dull thud echoed from the ground floor. The sound of a heavy door being broken down.
Élodie startled. Gabriel closed the laptop, slipped a USB drive into his pocket, and pulled an automatic pistol from the safe. “Go upstairs with the children. Do not come back down under any circumstances.”
“Gabriel, no!” she begged.
“Do as I say, Élodie! For once in my life, let me protect you!”
She ran upstairs. Gabriel descended the stairs in the dark. In the living room, three armed men equipped with night-vision goggles moved silently forward. Behind them, the silhouette of Henri Delmas stood framed in the broken doorway.
“You are predictable, Gabriel,” Henri sighed into the darkness. “I had your satellite phone pinged. It’s over. Give me the grey-eyed child. He will have a ‘tragic medical accident.’ As for the mother and the other boy, they will disappear. You will return to Paris, and we’ll say the stress of your divorce from Camille sent you on a little rest cure…”
Gabriel abruptly switched on the living room floodlights, blinding the intruders. He pointed his weapon directly at Henri’s head. “You forgot one thing, Henri,” Gabriel said in a voice from beyond the grave. “I am the son of the man who had the cruelty to lock up his own brother. I am worse than predictable. I am methodical.”
At that exact moment, wailing sirens tore through the silence of the forest. Dozens of blue flashing lights illuminated the barn windows.
Henri turned ashen. The henchmen dropped their weapons as they saw the flashing lights of the GIGN (special forces) and the Financial Brigade surrounding the property. “Marc didn’t just hack your servers, Henri,” Gabriel spat, stepping toward the trembling old man. “While you were coming here to kill my children, Marc was sending the evidence of your embezzlement, my uncle Arthur’s medical files, and your assassination orders directly to the Public Prosecutor and the Financial Markets Authority. Your empire of lies is dead.”
Henri tried to flee, but his legs gave out. He collapsed pitifully onto the floor as the doors burst open to reveal heavily armed police officers.
Epilogue
The salty air of the Nantes coast swept across Gabriel’s face. Sitting on the wooden terrace of Élodie’s house, he watched Adrien and Léo building an immense sandcastle on the beach a few meters below.
The “Montferrand” scandal had shaken the whole of France. Henri Delmas was in pre-trial detention in a high-security prison, charged with kidnapping, attempted murder, massive fraud, and extortion. Uncle Arthur, who had tragically passed away in his Swiss clinic ten years earlier, had been rehabilitated posthumously, his name finally associated with the capital’s major architectural projects.
Camille, gripped by panic and an accomplice by omission, had fled to Switzerland after a swift divorce, not getting a single cent of the immense family fortune.
Gabriel, meanwhile, had made a radical decision. Under the terms of the original will, the twins—and specifically Léo, the carrier of the genetic marker—had become the majority shareholders of the empire. But Gabriel, appointed legal guardian alongside Élodie, had called a board meeting to dismantle the dark side of the company. He liquidated the tainted assets to create the Arthur Montferrand Foundation, dedicated to research into rare genetic diseases and the support of single mothers.
He had left Paris, resigned from his operational position, and rented a small house five minutes away from Élodie’s.
The sliding glass door nudged open. Élodie appeared, holding two steaming cups of coffee. She handed him one and leaned against the railing beside him.
“They grow up too fast,” she murmured, watching the twins.
Gabriel took a sip of coffee, savoring the moment. He was no longer wearing his tailored suits. He wore a simple wool sweater and jeans. The dark circles under his eyes bore witness to the legal battles of the recent months, but his gaze had never been so peaceful.
“Élodie…” he said softly. “I know it’s a long road ahead. I know I can’t erase those five years of absence, nor ask you to love me like before.”
She turned her head toward him. The scars of betrayal were still there, visible in the caution of her movements. But the cold anger that had driven her in that Parisian restaurant was gone.
“You believed me that night, Gabriel,” she replied. “You protected our sons at the risk of your life. You destroyed your own inheritance for the truth. It’s a good start.”
She gently placed her free hand over Gabriel’s, which was resting on the railing. He closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the warmth of that simple contact he had thought was lost forever.
Down below on the sand, Léo turned back toward them. With his grey eyes sparkling under the Atlantic sun, free from any curse or any secret, he gave them a big wave.
Gabriel smiled, squeezed Élodie’s fingers, and waved back. The empire of shadows had collapsed, but on its ruins, they were finally going to be able to build a real family.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
