The Unwanted Heiress's Billionaire Return

Hadley Mccall POV:

The world tilted on its axis. The lab technician's words echoed in the silence of the Bentley, each one a hammer blow against the carefully constructed walls of my reality.

Sterile.

Biological daughter.

My granddaughter.

"Turn the car around! Now!" I roared at the driver, my voice raspy with a sudden, suffocating panic.

"But sir, we just left the hospital," my assistant, Thomas, said from the passenger seat.

"I don't give a damn! Go back!"

The tires squealed as the driver executed a reckless U-turn. We raced back to St. Jude's, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I burst through the emergency room doors, my eyes scanning wildly for a small girl with haunted eyes and a fresh line of stitches on her forehead.

"The girl who was in room 304," I demanded of the nurse at the station. "Where is she?"

The nurse looked up, her expression a mixture of surprise and pity. "I'm sorry, Mr. Mccall. Social services picked her up about ten minutes ago."

Ten minutes. I had missed her by ten minutes. A cold dread, heavy and bitter, settled in the pit of my stomach. We had cast her out. My own flesh and blood.

"Get them on the phone," I snapped at Thomas. "Find out where they took her. Now."

As Thomas frantically worked his phone, mine began to buzz. It was Kylie. I ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. Finally, Thomas looked up from his own call, his face pale.

"Sir, it's Miss Kylie. She says… she says it's her birthday party and you promised to be there. Mrs. Morrison is asking for you."

The triviality of it, the sheer, maddening absurdity of a birthday party in this moment, made me want to smash something.

"Handle it," I growled.

"Sir," Thomas said gently, a rare note of caution in his voice. "Perhaps it would be best to go to the party. We can't appear to be in a panic. It would upset Mrs. Morrison, and it would raise questions we are not prepared to answer. I can contact the agency. They will hold the child at their facility. We can retrieve her tomorrow morning, quietly."

He was right. Dionne's obsession with appearances was a force of nature. A public scene, a frantic search for that creature on the day of her precious Kylie's party, would be a catastrophe in her eyes. Pragmatism won out over the frantic clawing in my chest.

"Fine," I bit out. "Contact the agency. Tell them she is not to be placed anywhere. Tell them there has been a… clerical error. And get me to the house."

The Mccall estate was an explosion of pastel-colored extravagance. Balloons floated to the ceilings, a mountain of presents wrapped in shimmering paper filled one corner of the grand ballroom, and children in designer clothes ran screaming across the marble floors.

Dionne swept over to me the moment I walked in, her smile tight. "Hadley, there you are. Kylie was getting so upset."

Kylie, dressed like a miniature princess in a frilly pink gown, ran up and hugged my leg. "Grandpa! You missed the magician!"

She beamed up at me, then held up her wrist, displaying a delicate diamond and sapphire bracelet. "Look what Mommy gave me! It was her mother's! A Sawyer family heirloom!"

My blood ran cold. Eleanora had given a Sawyer heirloom-a piece of her own estranged family, a family she claimed to despise-to this child. The child we had chosen over our own.

Kylie prattled on, oblivious to the storm gathering inside me. "Grandma said you were at the hospital wasting time on that charity case from the woods. I can't believe she lied about her blood. She's so sneaky."

I looked down at this girl, this cuckoo in our nest, and for the first time, I didn't see a charming, adopted daughter. I saw a stranger wearing my daughter-in-law's legacy on her wrist.

The party was a living nightmare. I watched Kylie tear open presents with a greedy disinterest, tossing aside thousand-dollar dolls and electronics as if they were trash. I watched Dionne and Derek lavish her with praise, calling her their "perfect daughter," their "miracle." Each word was a fresh twist of the knife in my gut.

The final straw came during the cake cutting. A maid brought out a silver bowl of water for Zeus, who was panting by the French doors.

Kylie saw the bowl and her face contorted in a mask of theatrical disgust. "Ugh! Not that one! That's the one she used! It's contaminated!"

The maid, flustered, stammered, "No, Miss Kylie, her bowl was thrown out. This is a new one."

"I don't care!" Kylie shrieked, her voice rising to a piercing wail. The entire party fell silent. "It looks the same! I don't want to see it! I don't want to see anything she ever touched! Burn it! Burn all of it! I want everything she touched to be incinerated!"

Her tantrum was so vile, so filled with a venom that went far beyond childish petulance, that something inside me finally snapped.

I slammed my hand down on the dining table. The crystal glasses jumped, and a collective gasp went through the room.

"Enough," I thundered, my voice shaking with a rage I hadn't felt in years.