Page 116 of Merciless Prince

I swallowed thickly. “I know I look like this woman, but it’s just a coincidence. I’m not her daughter. I know who my parents are.”

Cooper narrowed his eyes and played around on his phone for a moment. Then he held the screen up to me. “This is the woman you know as your mother, Shay. Dana Sinclair.”

“Sheismy mother,” I said, looking at the old photo of my parents. “Just look at her. We have the same eyes and nose. Same hair too.”

“It’s not exactly a rare nose shape, is it? And brown hair is extremely common. So are brown eyes.” Cooper thrust the phone under my nose again. “Admit it. You look much more like Carla Bronson than Dana Sinclair.”

A lump appeared in my throat. Cooper was right. Carla looked like my clone, while Dana was merely a pale imitation of me.

“I understand how shocking this is to you,” Cooper said. “But it’s the truth. You’re a Vandenberg by blood, Shay. Your real name is Olivia, and you were stolen from Carla and her husband when you were five months old.”

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “No. You’ve made a mistake,” I said. “I’m not the girl you’re looking for. I just look a lot like her.”

He smiled thinly. “There’s no mistake. Like I said before, I knew who you were from the first moment I saw you.”

“When?” I asked, mind whirling. “That day at Bellingham?”

It didn’t make any sense. Cooper didn’t seem surprised to see me at all on that first day on campus, but if I were really the long-lost ‘ghost’ of Olivia Bronson, he would’ve looked utterly stunned. Instead he just acted like any other random person meeting me for the first time.

He shook his head. “I found you a long time before you ended up at Bellingham.”

“How?”

“I had some friends visiting from overseas. They wanted to do all the typical tourist stuff like seeing the Statue of Liberty and Times Square,” he said. “When we were in Times Square, we walked past an electronic billboard with an ad for some sort of whitening toothpaste. Seeing the girl on the screen was like getting hit by lightning. It was Carla… only it wasn’t. So I went home and figured out which casting company the advertisers used. Then I tracked down the actress from the ad.You.”

“That commercial hasn’t been shown anywhere for four months now,” I said, eyes widening.

“I know. It took me a long time to gather every piece of information I could get on you and your life. Your imposter parents, too.”

I slowly shook my head. “So you stalked me for months. Then you followed me to Bellingham and pretended to be my friend. Why?”

“I wanted to get to know you. I also needed to get close to you,” he said. “I had to know for sure before I told anyone that I’d found you. That’s how I know there’s no mistake here.”

My brows scrunched together. “What do you mean?”

“When you invited me over to your dorm to hang out one day, I told you I needed to use the bathroom. I took your toothbrush while I was in there.”

“That wasyou?”

A glimmer of self-satisfied amusement appeared in his eyes. “Yes. After that, I paid one of the Vandenberg maids to get me a sample of Carla’s hair. Then I sent the two samples to a DNA testing lab.”

He tapped on his phone again. Then he handed it to me. On the screen, there was an email from a lab with a copy of the test results. It showed a familial match between the two samples with 99.99% certainty.

Another hard lump appeared in my throat. “This isn’t possible,” I choked out, eyes brimming with tears. “My parents—”

“Weren’t perfect people,” Cooper interjected. “You said that yourself.”

“I just meant they had no problem avoiding a few taxes here and there!” I said. “That doesn’t make them baby thieves!”

“But they are. Orwere,I should say,” he said, raising a brow.

“No.” I stubbornly shook my head. “They were good people, and they loved me.”

“No one is saying the Sinclairs didn’t love you, Shay. They just weren’t your real parents.”

“You’re wrong.”

“No, I’m not. DNA doesn’t lie.”