Chapter 7: The Bloodline of Bellevue
Maximilian slowly stood up, his legs shaking beneath him as he looked down at Clara. For months, this girl had been cleaning his floors, and he had been too blinded by his own grief and corporate duties to truly look at her.
But now, looking at her with his eyes wide open, the truth was undeniable.
The delicate, aristocratic bone structure hidden beneath her hollow, malnourished cheeks. The striking, deep violet-blue color of her eyes—a rare genetic trait passed down through three generations of the Bellevue bloodline. The unmistakable shape of her jawline. She wasn't just a random orphan. She was a living ghost.
"The crest... the timeline... the eyes," Maximilian whispered, a stray tear escaping his own eye as he looked back down at her with a profound mix of joy and overwhelming disbelief.
He reached down, took Clara’s rough, calloused hands in his, and pulled her gently but firmly up from the marble floor, forcing her to stand as an equal in her own house.
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"You’re my lost sister," he breathed, his voice echoing through the grand hall with the force of a tectonic shift. "You are Clara Miller Bellevue. You've been home this entire time."
Clara gasped, her mouth opening in a silent wail of shock as the reality of his words crashed into her consciousness. The mother she remembered in the charity ward wasn't her biological mother; she was the nurse who had rescued her from the flames of the burning manor all those years ago.
