My Rich Parents Forced My Adopted Daughter To Wash Dishes On Christmas—Until A Paternity Test Proved She Was My Late Brother’s Only Heir!

The room felt entirely devoid of air. Outside, the blizzard howled against the windowpanes, rattling the glass. Sofia and Emma's delighted shrieks drifted down the corridor, unburdened by the dark rot festering in our family.

""He was going to give everything to a nobody!"" Carmen wept, her fingers clawing at her pearls. ""Julian met that girl—that waitress from the diner near his art studio. Elena. She got pregnant. Julian came to us demanding his trust fund, demanding his grandfather’s inheritance so he could run away with her! He said he was stripping the DeLuca name of its vanity!""

My father remained rigid, his face like carved granite. ""Julian’s grandfather left fifty-five percent of DeLuca Enterprises directly to Julian’s firstborn child. It was an archaic trust clause designed to bypass me because my father believed I was too reckless with commercial acquisitions. If Julian had a legitimate heir, that child became the controlling shareholder upon turning twenty-five, with a massive living stipend immediately accessible to the mother.""

The puzzle pieces snapped together with horrifying clarity. ""So when Julian died...""

""Julian didn't die by accident,"" Carmen sobbed, suddenly clamping both hands over her mouth as if trying to swallow the words back down.

I froze. ""What did you just say?""

Hector glared at his wife with pure venom. ""Silence, Carmen!"" He turned to me, his voice dangerously measured. ""Julian was drunk. He took the curve too fast after arguing with me. The girl—Elena—vanished after the funeral. She knew she had no standing without Julian to protect her. When she died of complications during childbirth a year later, the social services pinged the estate through a state database.""

""And you intercepted it,"" I said, my voice shaking with uncontainable rage. ""You used your connections to put Julian's baby into an obscure private home, stripped of her identity. You erased her!""

""We protected the empire!"" Hector slammed his fist onto the mahogany desk. ""Julian was gone! We could not allow an illegitimate child born of a low-class woman to hold the fate of thousands of employees and our family's fortune! When you announced you wanted to adopt, your mother manipulated the agency to push Renata into your path. We thought... we thought having her under your roof, raised quietly as an adopted charity case without legal claim to the trust, would keep our hands clean!""

I looked back at the armchair. Renata had curled into a small ball, holding her knees, watching us with enormous, terrified brown eyes—eyes that were the exact shape, color, and depth of my late brother Julian’s.

All those years, my parents had treated her with open contempt, not because she was a stranger, but because she was a threat. They forced her into the shadows, belittled her, and made her scrub grease on Christmas Day because every time they looked at her face, they saw the boy they had failed, and the fortune they had stolen.

""You didn't adopt a charity, Mauricio,"" Hector said coldly, stepping toward me with an outstretched hand. ""You brought a time bomb into this house. Vance & Sterling discovered the discrepancy because Elena’s distant sister hired an investigator before she passed away. They know the baby survived. But no one outside this room knows that Renata is that child. Give me those papers. We will settle with the lawyers quietly, pay them off, and Renata will remain your daughter. She will never want for anything, but she cannot have the company.""

""You made her wash dishes while her cousins opened diamonds,"" I snarled, stepping into his space until our chests nearly touched. ""You called her a parasite. You treated Julian's flesh and blood like a servant!""