The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 249

Chapter 223: Richard and Margaret Move Again

Margret pov

Claim

We were sitting in the small kitchen of the Kensington flat, a place far too small for a man who used to run Hart Industries. Richard was pacing the floor, his shair messy, his face twisted with anger.

“We can’t just let her stay up there, Margaret, Richard said, slamming his hand on the counter. “Bella took everything. She took our company, she took our family name, and she has the world thinking she is some kind of business genius.”

“What do you want to do, Richard?” I asked, sipping my tea. “She won. We are stuck in this flat.”

“No, she hasn’t won yet,” Richard sneered, leaning over the table. “I have a contact. A journalist from the old days. He owes me a massive favor, and he is running out of time to pay it back. We place a story in the right business column at the exact moment she is trying to manage her new billionaire father.”

“What kind of story?” I asked.

“The truth,” Richard said, his eyes gleaming. “Or at least, our version of it. Bella’s biological parentage proves the whole Hart Industries takeover was fake. She was never a real Hart. Her claim to our name and our money is totally illegitimate.”

“Legally, that means nothing, Richard,” I said plainly. “The lawyers will throw it out.”

“Legally doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “The disruption matters. The doubt matters. If the business world thinks she is a fraud, her stock drops. Marchetti might even back away from her. But I need the specific details, Margaret. I need the things only you know about your sister.”

I closed my eyes as I thought about Elaine. It was always about Elaine.

“I have the journalist on the line,” Richard said, pressing his phone into my hand. “Make the call. Give him the pieces. Let’s finish this.”

I took the phone, made the call. When the man answered, my voice was steady and cold.

“This is Margaret Hart,” I said into the receiver. “I have the details you need for the story about Bella Hart-Black.”

ľ

“Go ahead, Mrs. Hart,” the journalist said. “I need specifics if we are going to run this against someone that powerful.”

I

“Her mother was my younger sister, Elaine Voss,” I said, staring at the kitchen wall. “Thirty one years ago, Elaine went to Geneva for an arts fellowship. That is where she met Sebastien Marchetti. She came back pregnant, but she never told us who the father was.”

“Can you prove the Marchetti connection?” the journalist asked.

“Elaine died of a sudden heart defect six months after the baby was born. A congenital issue. Nobody caught it in time. When she died, Richard and I took the infant and registered her as Isabella Hart.”

“Why take her if you didn’t want her?”

13

Chapter 223 Mehard and Margaret Move Again

Claim

“Because of the money,” I said directly “We accepted a private financial arrangement from Elaine’s estate Trustees. We took the checks, and we raised the girl. But she was never ours, she was a business arrangement from day one.”

“This is perfect,” the journalist murmured. “It makes her whole rise look dirty. It makes her look like a lie.”

“Run it,” I said, and I hung up the phone.

Afterwards, I sat alone in the kitchen. I expected to feel happy, or at least satisfied. But all I felt was a sour, flat weight in my chest.

I thought about Elaine in her yellow dress in Geneva, laughing in a photo I had hidden away for decades. I had hated Bella from the moment I saw her because she looked exactly like my sister who died.

I poured a glass of wine and tried to stop thinking.

The next morning, the phone rang early. It was the journalist calling Richard. I stood by the door, listening.

“What do you mean it’s dead?” Richard shouted into the phone, his face turning red. “We gave you everything! The names, the medical history, the financial records!”

The voice on the other end was quiet and clipped. “I’m withdrawing the piece. The story is not running. I am sorry to waste your time.” The line went dead.

Richard walked into the kitchen, his lips completely white with fury. He slammed the phone onto the table.

“Someone killed it,” Richard hissed. “Someone with real power made a phone call to the publishers. A call I can’t trace. It has to be Bella.”

“Maybe,” I said quietly, looking at my wine glass.

“I will find another angle,” Richard swore, pacing like a caged animal. “Another paper. Another blogger. I will find someone else to print it.”

I looked at him, and suddenly, I felt entirely tired.

“Don’t,” I said to my husband.

Richard stopped and stared at me. “What?”

す

“Don’t find another angle,” I said, my voice completely flat. “We’re done.”

Richard’s face twisted into an ugly, furious mask. He took a heavy step toward me, kicking a kitchen chair out of his way. “We are done? We are done when I say we are done, Margaret! This is all your fault for housing that animal!”

“She is my sister’s child, Richard, not an animal,” I said, my voice trembling but rising to meet his anger.

“Shut up!” he roared, slamming his fist onto the dinner table so hard the glasses rattled. “Your real daughter is rotting in a cell, and you have the guts to talk to me like this? Jade is locked away because of that girl, and you want to sit there and defend the person who ruined us?”

“Jade was wrong!” I shouted back, the frustration finally breaking through my cold mask. “Jade went too far, Richard! She lied, she schemed, and she ruined her own life trying to steal what wasn’t hers!”

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