CHAPTER 17 — ISABELLA’S BARGAIN
Isabella requested a private meeting with Khloe.
Gabriel refused.
Khloe overruled him.
The two women faced each other through a glass partition in the hospital’s secure consultation room.
Isabella wore a plain hospital gown. Her makeup was gone, and exhaustion had erased her confidence.
Khloe remained in a wheelchair.
“You nearly killed my daughter.”
Isabella looked down.
“I know.”
“Why should I listen to anything you say?”
“Because Marcus wasn’t the person who paid me.”
Khloe’s expression hardened.
“Who did?”
“I never saw her face.”
“The woman in the veil?”
Isabella nodded.
“She contacted me months ago. She knew about Marcus and me. She sent photographs, messages, hotel records.”
“She blackmailed you?”
“At first. Then she offered me something I wanted.”
“Marcus?”
“A future with him.”
Khloe almost laughed.
“You believed that?”
“I wanted to.”
Isabella pressed her hands against the glass.
“She told me to make you fall. She said the hospital would handle the rest.”
“The syringe?”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“But you kicked me.”
Tears filled Isabella’s eyes.
“I was furious. Marcus kept choosing you in public. I wanted you humiliated. I didn’t understand the larger plan until she gave me the syringe.”
Khloe leaned closer.
“What did the woman call herself?”
“She never used a name.”
“Then how did you contact her?”
“Through a private number.”
“That phone is gone.”
Isabella shook her head.
“I memorized the final four digits.”
She wrote them on the glass with her fingertip.
Khloe recognized the number.
It belonged to a phone her father had given her mother shortly before the fatal accident.
The account had supposedly been closed nineteen years earlier.
Isabella whispered, “She said something else.”
“What?”
“She said you were never supposed to marry Marcus.”
Khloe’s heart began pounding.
May you like
“Why?”
“Because Marcus is not Alexander Thorne’s biological son.”
