'Shane! What a surprise!' Linda smiled brightly at him, reaching forward to hug him.

But Shane stepped back, out of reach. 'I know, Mom. What you did.'

She looked at him with confusion. 'What are you talking about, Shane?'

He stared at her. 'I know about the tape, about using Campbell Irvine to get that doctor to pose as an actor. I know practically everything.'

Linda's face turned into an emotionless mask. She said nothing.

'I see that you're not denying it. Everything is true.'

'Well, you certainly have been a busy little beaver, haven't you?' Linda asked, her face suddenly turning savage.

Shane was surprised by the abrupt and unexpected change in his mother's demeanour. 'I was looking out for my baby sister,' he said quietly. 'You always told me that's what I had to do. "Look out for you baby sister, take care of her at all times," you used to tell me. I got that from you.'

'I guess I wasn't a complete failure as your mother then, was I?' There was a new callousness and mean-spiritedness about Linda, something akin to the so-called 'McMahon mean streak'. But on Linda, it was worse than that. There was a dark side to her that was simply…evil.

Shane shook his head slowly, his mind spinning at the way things were turning out. He had never expected this. 'Why? Why would you do that to Stephanie?'

Linda smiled without humour. 'Would you believe me if I told you I was jealous of my own daughter?'

'What…what are you talking about?'

'Stephanie McMahon. Daddy's Little Girl. Shane's Golden Sister. Princess!' Disgust twisted Linda's features as she spat out the last word. 'Stephanie could do no wrong, could she? You and Vince forgave her for every mistake that she made, no matter how big it was. And Hunter? Well, he fell right in line, didn't he? All she had to say was that she was pregnant, and he was fawning all over her again!'

Shane was horrified. Of all the excuses, explanations, justifications he had considered his mother would make none of them came close to the reason she had just admitted. 'Oh, god…you don't mean that…'

Linda's eyes narrowed. 'And you! Well, you were the perfect son, weren't you? When it came to Vince it was always about you and Stephanie. I was supposed to inherit the company, the money, the power was to go to me after Vince's death, but then you came along. The heir to the McMahon fortune, and Vince invested everything in you!'

This wasn't his mother, the woman he had come to admire immensely. The woman he had loved his entire life, and whom he had always respected. The caring, honest, warm, devoted person he had always cherished as being the woman who gave birth to him.

She was supposed to be the best one out of all them…wasn't she?

'No, you can't mean that,' Shane whispered. 'You just can't…something's not right…drugs, or something…we need to get you help…'

'I'm perfectly sane, son,' Linda said in her most matter-of-fact voice. 'There's nothing wrong with me at all.'

'But…but…how could you ruin your own daughter's life on purpose like that?' he asked, almost in despair. Already he was wishing that he had never found out the truth.

'Ruin? You call the disintegration of a marriage to a degenerate like Hunter a ruin?' Linda asked incredulously. 'Personally, I call it saving her from a life of abject misery.'

'Despite his many failings, Stephanie loved Hunter. You knew that.'

She just shrugged indifferently. 'Well, she's got his baby to remember him by.'

Shane was filled with sudden revulsion for the selfish woman who stood before him. She wasn't his mother. As far as he was concerned, he and Stephanie were motherless. He wanted to reveal to her about Stephanie's miscarriage, but he stopped himself in time. He didn't even want to think about Linda's reaction to her own daughter's misery.

Without another word, Shane turned and walked away from the most heartless person he had ever known.