“I know. But first I need to know what we’re dealing with.”
We hung up. I kept looking at my phone. Then I looked around my small living room. The old furniture, the photos on the walls, the crucifix over the entrance.
This house was not worth $4,500,000. It was worth much more. It was worth every drop of sweat I had shed working double shifts to buy it. It was worth every sacrifice, every sleepless night, every moment of loneliness.
And Chelsea thought she could just take it away from me. She thought she could manipulate my son, torture my grandson, and wait for my death like someone waiting for a check.
I stood up and walked to the window. Outside, the sky was tinged with orange and pink. A new day was beginning. And with it, my battle.
Because Chelsea didn’t know something. She didn’t know that I wasn’t a defenseless old woman waiting to die. I was Elellanena Stone, former commander of criminal investigations, a woman who had faced drug traffickers, murderers, and criminals of all kinds—and none of them had managed to defeat me.
Chelsea had just declared a war, and I was going to make sure she lost it.
The investigation was just beginning. And what I discovered about Chelsea made me realize that my grandson and I were not her first victims.
Two days later, Linda appeared at my door at 9:00 a.m. She carried a thick folder under her arm and an expression I knew very well—the look of someone who had just uncovered something rotten.
“Commander, you need to sit down before I show you this.”
I made coffee while Ethan was in the shower. He had spent those two days with me, recovering. The swelling on his eyebrow had gone down, but the scar would remain forever—a permanent mark of Chelsea’s cruelty.
We sat at the dining table. Linda opened the folder and began taking out documents, photographs, screenshots.
“Chelsea Brooks started as Vanessa Jimenez Ruiz in Houston, Texas. Thirty-four years old, not thirty-two as she told your son. First lie confirmed. She never attended private schools. She finished high school at a public school, and there is no record of her setting foot in any university. She worked as a waitress, a promoter, and eventually as a dealer in several casinos across the country.”
