Snatched a Billionaire to Be My Husband – Episode 43
Easton’s confession reopened a weakness everyone thought the Hansen investigation had closed. He had protected Margaret by concealing a federal agent’s attempt to manufacture evidence, repeating the family habit of using silence as a shield. His reasons were more sympathetic than Malcolm’s, but the result left Mercer inside every later inquiry.
Cora asked Easton to preserve all messages and come to Byron’s independent ethics office. He resisted involving his uncle, still ashamed of the offer he had once considered. “Shame is what Mercer counted on,” Cora said. “If you keep protecting it, you keep working for him.”
Easton arrived carrying an old phone he had hidden beneath the floor of his father’s study. The messages showed Mercer promising that Margaret would avoid prosecution if Easton placed a copied authorization token in Byron’s office. Easton never completed the task, yet one response read, I need time, which Mercer could portray as agreement.
Byron did not absolve his nephew. He asked why Easton failed to report the contact after choosing not to cooperate. Easton admitted he feared losing the first approval Margaret had shown him since Malcolm’s death. Saving her had felt like a chance to become the son she wanted.
“Becoming useful to someone’s fear is not the same as becoming worthy,” Byron said. The rebuke carried no cruelty, only recognition. Cora heard in it the lesson both Hansen men had learned through different failures: love built on control always demanded another compromise.
The locker on Reed’s ticket stood in the oldest wing of Union Station. With a court order from a prosecutor outside Mercer’s chain of command, they opened it under camera. Inside were copies of every document Mercer had removed from the Vale archive, along with a ledger linking him to Malcolm.
Mercer had accepted payments to redirect the original Lane fraud investigation away from Malcolm. After Malcolm’s death, Miriam paid him to protect the guardian trust. When Miriam surrendered, he changed sides again, selling information to Adrian while preserving enough evidence to blackmail Celeste.
The locker also contained sealed prenatal medical records belonging to Cora. Someone had accessed her hospital chart after the vault incident and copied the results of a routine genetic screening. The intrusion had no investigative purpose.
Seeing her measurements and test dates in Mercer’s private ledger left Cora more exposed than the public attacks ever had. Financial crimes could be reconstructed through numbers; pregnancy involved a body she could not separate from the evidence. She asked the prosecutor to restrict every copy before another official treated medical privacy as collateral damage.
The prosecutor agreed to seek an immediate protective order. Byron asked before reading the records, and Cora allowed him because they concerned their child. The small exchange mattered. Criminal access had stolen her control, but she could still decide who entered that part of her life afterward.
A handwritten note claimed the fetus carried a hereditary cardiac mutation common in Roland’s family. The actual laboratory page was missing. If true, Cora needed medical guidance. If false, the claim could frighten her into seeking care through a Vale hospital Mercer controlled.
Dr. Kim arranged independent testing at a university clinic. Byron wanted the earliest appointment, but Cora insisted Evelyn be tested as well so doctors could distinguish maternal history from Vale inheritance. Medical truth would not become another family secret decided around her.
Mercer disappeared before internal affairs reached his office. His badge last opened a restricted garage beneath the federal building, where investigators found blood, a broken phone, and no body. The scene might indicate an attack or another staged disappearance.
Carter was released and immediately traced Mercer’s copied hospital records. The access request originated from Dr. Kim’s credentials. Dr. Kim denied opening the chart and submitted his devices voluntarily. His clinic tablet had been cloned while he attended Cora at the coastal hospital.
The clone connected to a server operated by Vale Women’s Health, the same division Celeste wanted Roland to sell. The division’s medical director, Dr. Lydia Grant, had signed the memo about the alleged mutation. She had also served as Evelyn’s physician during the pregnancy Cora never knew about.
Evelyn remembered Lydia as a resident who warned her not to deliver at a Vale hospital. Miriam had introduced them. Lydia falsified discharge records after Cora’s birth, helping Charles and Evelyn leave without triggering Marcus’s custody order.
That history made the theft harder to understand. Lydia might be protecting Cora from a legitimate genetic risk, or she might be using old trust to draw her back into Vale control. Cora called the number on the memo rather than appearing at the clinic.
Lydia answered from what sounded like a moving car. She apologized for accessing the record but said the screening result had been altered before Dr. Kim received it. The baby did not merely carry a mutation; the test contained a genetic marker proving the sample had been substituted.
Before Cora could ask whose sample replaced hers, tires screeched through the call. Lydia shouted that Mercer had found her. A crash followed, then silence. Carter traced the phone to a canyon road where police found Lydia’s car overturned and empty.
On the passenger seat lay a blood-stained laboratory envelope addressed to Byron. Inside was a paternity report stating that he could not be the father of Cora’s unborn child.