30. Give My Heart to Tania

30. Give My Heart to Tania

The old man sat down hard once he was alone, Caleb’s words finally sinking in past the sting of his own slap.

Pregnant. The enemy’s daughter, carrying his great-grandchild.

“How cruel is fate,” he murmured to the empty room.

Mr. Stanton stepped back in before the thought could settle. “She’s still the enemy’s daughter. Are you really going to let that bloodline into this family?”

“The child hasn’t done anything,” the old man said. “The child is innocent.”

Mr. Stanton pulled a gun from his jacket, aiming it steady at the old man’s chest. “She has to die. My daughter is the only one who deserves to raise the next generation of this family.”

The old man shouted for his guards. Every one of them filed in and simply stood behind Mr. Stanton instead, waiting.

They tied the old man to his own chair. He wept, more from disbelief than fear, as Mr. Stanton calmly explained just how long he’d spent orchestrating his own son-in-law’s corruption, how long he’d coveted the Wilson family’s wealth from the shadows.

Sophia stepped out from the hallway, arms crossed, watching her father work.

“Since you’re going to kill him anyway,” she said, “why not tell him the real truth first? Let the regret finish the job.”

 

• • •

 

Caleb was already speeding back toward the small villa, furious, sick with worry, when something cold gripped his chest hard enough to make him pull over in the middle of the road.

He sat there a moment, heart pounding for no reason he could name, then turned the car around and drove straight back to his grandfather’s estate instead.

The front door hung open. Caleb found the old man slumped in his chair, a dark stain spreading across his shirt, no pulse left to find no matter how hard Caleb shook him.

Mr. Stanton, Sophia, and their men were long gone, slipped out the moment they’d sensed him coming.

Caleb tore through the mansion room by room, shouting Tania’s name until his voice went ragged.

His foot caught on a loose marble tile near the fireplace. The hearth shifted under his weight, and a small hidden panel clicked open in the wall behind it.

He hit the switch without hesitating and took the narrow staircase two steps at a time.

At the top, in a small locked room, he found her. Bound. Gagged. Still.

 

• • •

 

Relief hit him for exactly one second before her eyelids fluttered and he tore the tape from her mouth.

Blood came with it, more than should have been possible from tape alone.

She smiled at him, faint and fading, and then she was gone, limp in his arms before he could say her name.

“Tania.” He shook her. “Tania!”

He carried her down the stairs at a dead run, splashed water on her face, pressed his ear to her chest and found a heartbeat so faint he had to hold his own breath to catch it.

“Wake up,” he begged. “Please. Wake up.”

His bodyguards arrived seconds later. He was already moving before they’d fully processed the scene, Tania cradled against his chest, running for the car.

Ashton was waiting at the hospital entrance by the time they arrived, his face draining of color at the sight of her. He had her on a gurney and was pressing rhythmically against her chest before Caleb had even let go.

“What the hell is wrong with her!” Caleb grabbed Ashton’s shoulder, spinning him around. “Tell me!”

 

• • •

 

Ashton hesitated only a moment before the whole truth came out at once. The heart condition. The timeline that had never been in her favor. Her quiet decision, weeks ago, to carry the pregnancy anyway, knowing it would take even the little time she had left.

Cecile and Nicole arrived in the middle of it. Cecile went white, then furious, crossing the room to shove Caleb hard in the chest.

“What did you do to her,” she said, voice breaking. “What did you do?”

Caleb didn’t have an answer. He thought of his mother, of the same disease, of every cruel thing he’d said to Tania over two years believing her family had caused it. He slid down the wall to the floor and held his own head in his hands.

His phone rang. His bodyguard, reporting that Mr. Stanton and Sophia had been caught trying to flee the country.

He hung up. It rang again immediately, an unknown number this time.

“There are two women, Mr. Wilson,” the voice said. “Carla. And Cody. Not the same person. Never the same person.”

Caleb sat frozen on the hospital floor, the truth landing on him like something physical.

Tania’s mother had never touched his father at all.

He had spent two years destroying the one person who’d never done anything to him, over a mistake that wasn’t even hers to answer for.

“What have I done,” he whispered, to no one.

 

• • •

 

“Is there any way to save her?” Caleb asked, once he could stand again.

Ashton’s face was grim. “A transplant, at a bigger facility. Even then, the odds aren’t good. For her or the baby.”

“Get the fastest plane available.”

He carried her onto the medical jet himself, refusing to let anyone else touch her. Cecile tried to follow, sobbing, and Nicole and Vivian held her back at the door as the plane began to taxi.

Inside, Caleb held Tania’s hand and pressed his forehead to hers.

“Wake up,” he said. “Please, Nia. Wake up.”

Her eyes stayed closed. He kept talking anyway, needing her to hear it even if she couldn’t.

“I love you too,” he said. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”

Outside the window, the clear sky vanished in minutes, replaced by a wall of white. The plane shuddered hard, then harder, the pilot’s voice crackling something urgent over the intercom that Caleb didn’t have time to process.

He wrapped his whole body around Tania instead, curling over her as the cabin tilted and the world outside turned to static and snow.