Chapter 9 - THE BLOODLINE PAPERS
Behind a stack of folded wool blankets, Elowen noticed a tiny, magnetic panel near the baseboard—a hidden compartment she had never seen before.
The panel was loose, left unlatched in Mara's rush to escape.
Elowen reached inside and pulled out a secondary manila folder that had been left behind. She brought it over to the nightstand lamp and unsealed the brass clasp.
Inside were medical documents stamped with the seal of a private fertility clinic in Zurich, Switzerland—dated eight months before Elowen had ever met Kael.
Elowen’s hands trembled as she read the top document:
PROJECT ERION: DNA MATRIX MATERNAL REPLACEMENT LOG.
Her eyes scanned down the page. The technical medical terminology blurred before her eyes, but three distinct facts stood out like fire:
Kael was biologically sterile due to a genetic condition.
Baby Leo was not conceived naturally during Elowen and Kael's marriage as she had been led to believe during her specialized IVF treatment.
The maternal egg donor listed on the clinical file was not Elowen.
It was Mara’s late daughter—Kael’s deceased sister, Iris—whose genetic material had been preserved before her death in a high-profile car accident three years ago.
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Elowen gasped, dropping the papers onto the floor.
Her entire marriage... her pregnancy... the specialized doctor Kael and Mara had insisted she use... it had all been a dark, calculated surrogate scam. Elowen hadn't been chosen as a wife. She had been selected as a healthy, un-networked incubator to bring Iris’s preserved genetic heir into the world to claim a multi-hundred-million-dollar family trust.
