I Married The Same Man As My Best Friend Chapter 07

I Married The Same Man As My Best Friend Chapter 07

The ballroom went so quiet you could hear Julian breathing.

Hard. Fast. Like an animal trapped in a corner.

The projection wall froze on Lily’s face. Those last, wide eyes.

Julian sat on the floor. Everything he’d built-the calm, the double life, the Sterling empire-was peeling off

him in strips.

“Someone call the police!” a woman shrieked.

Vanessa ran to the screen and threw herself in front of it, like she could block the evidence with her body.

Her perfect makeup was ruined. Her face was a twisted mask of fear.

“Fake! It’s all fake! Harrison paid for this! Julian loved Lily. He was just trying to scare Elise.”

“Love?”

I walked over to Vanessa and dumped my champagne glass over her head.

“You watched Lily stop breathing, Vanessa. You told Julian to use his own daughter’s blood to scare me into

submission.”

The police were already moving in.

Julian was shoved onto the cold marble floor. His hands were cuffed behind his back. The silicone mask was

peeled off his face like a second layer of skin.

Underneath, he looked sick. Pale. Unrecognizable.

“Elise… Elise, please.”

He crawled toward me on his knees, reaching for my dress.

“Vanessa tricked me! I only love you! I didn’t know she switched the doll for Lily. I never wanted to hurt our

daughter…”

I looked down at him.

My heart didn’t move.

“Love?” I bent down and whispered in his ear. “Julian, before Lily was cremated, I kept a strand of her hair. I

had a DNA test done.”

His body went rigid.

“You always thought Lily was Dorian’s daughter, didn’t you? That’s why you let Vanessa switch the doll.

That’s why you didn’t stop the car.”

“But guess what the test said?”

“Ninety-nine point nine nine percent. Yours.”

His eyes went hollow.

“Back then, to trick me into marrying you, you planned to get me drunk. But what you didn’t expect was that the person who came into the room that night wasn’t you at all.”

“It was Dorian, the man you had drugged. That’s why you always believed Lily was a bastard child.”

“So, even when you knew Vanessa had swapped the prop cloth doll for the real Lily, you did nothing. You

wanted to kill her by someone else’s hand.”

“All of it, to torment me, to get revenge for Vanessa, to eliminate the one you thought was the sole heir to

Dorian’s share of the fortune.”

“All those years, Julian. You hated a child who was yours. You burned your own blood.”

He started screaming.

Not words. Just sounds. He slammed his head against the floor over and over.

“Lily… Lily…”

The police cuffed him.

Right before they pulled him up, he turned to Vanessa.

“You… you switched the DNA report. You made me think she was Dorian’s.”

“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you!”

Vanessa didn’t even flinch.

She looked at him with dead eyes and said, “But you’re the one who told them to drag her for ninety-nine

laps.”

I turned away.

Outside, fireworks lit up the sky. The gala’s grand finale.

I touched the tiny charm around my neck-Lily’s charm,

“You hear that, baby?” I whispered. “That’s his funeral bell.”

Ninety-nine miles wasn’t finished.

They’d run the rest of it in a cage.