Chapter 9
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Chapter 9
“The moment I saw you on that livestream, I knew you were the child who was abandoned all those years ago. That’s why they were so terrified when they saw you.
“Not only did you survive, but you fell in love with Lukas and even had his child.
“So what are you, exactly? Lukas’s aunt? His sister? Or maybe his wife, the mother of his child?”
Charles gave a twisted, malicious grin-part mockery, part excitement.
Inside, I felt strangely calm, as if his taunts had nothing to do with me at all.
I looked him in the eye. “You’ve stayed hidden for over 20 years, and now you’ve finally found me. But you’re not here to play the role of a loving father, are you?”
Charles sighed, his tone dripping with regret.
“That heart I got back then is failing. I need a new one. I’d already given up-but then you turned up pregnant. My lovely daughter. You don’t really want to bring this cursed child into the world, do you? Why not just give me her heart instead?
“Don’t even think about running. If I could find you once, I’ll be waiting when you give birth, ready to take the baby
and her heart the moment she’s born!
“Oh, by the way, what did that old woman say before she died? Was it about your past?”
Charles sounded curious, but his expression was pure contempt. He thought Freya’s secret was just about my parent-
age.
After all, I was the child of Charles and Wren, yet I ended up with Lukas and got pregnant. That kind of disgrace would be enough to crush anyone with shame, enough to drive them to suicide.
But he was wrong.
I gently stroked my belly, letting a slow smile spread across my lips.
“You’re dying anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t matter if I tell you.
“Freya’s secret was simple. Just one sentence.
“She said, the two children she abandoned all those years ago have come back for revenge.”
Charles’s eyes widened in shock. “Two? Your mother only had one baby! How could there be two?!”
I pressed my palm harder against my belly, my smile twisting with bitterness and hate.
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288 iVouchers
Chapter 9
There’s a rare condition in medicine where, in a set of twins, the stronger one absorbs the weaker, but the weaker doesn’t disappear. It lingers inside, like a tumor, attached to the stronger sibling’s body.
That’s why, when a kind soul found me as a child, my stomach was so distended-because my sister was living inside.
After Wren was raped by Charles, Freya pretended not to see. Later, she even convinced Wren to carry the pregnancy to save Lukas, and to save that old bastard as well.
Freya knew how deep her sins ran, so she didn’t just abandon the child as they’d planned. Instead, she wrote a long letter explaining everything and left me near an orphanage.
That’s how I survived.
But the weak twin inside me was a ticking time bomb. She clung to my body like a tumor, and no one could say when she’d take my life. That’s why the director and the others always looked at me with such pity.
That’s why the director forbade me from leaving the orphanage, from falling in love or having children-because pregnancy would make the tumor grow uncontrollably.
But I didn’t listen. I wandered through life and eventually met Lukas. And somehow, I found my way into his family.
Freya was an alternative medicine practitioner. All it took was a touch of my pulse for her to recognize I was the child from all those years ago.
Guilt-ridden, Freya chose suicide. Blake and Wren couldn’t bear the truth either, and ended their lives to escape it.
The saddest of all was Lukas. He knew nothing, but the weight of guilt crushed him, robbed him of the will to live. Only at the end did he tell me the truth.
He wanted me to hate him, to abort the child and move on with my life, free of his family’s curse.
But he never knew-I was never actually pregnant. The life growing inside me was my twin sister.
She had been dormant in my body for over 20 years, and now she was finally breaking free.
I forced myself to keep living, just to drag Charles-the true villain-into the light.
When I finished, Charles stared at me in horror, his face so pale he looked like a corpse.
He pointed at my stomach, voice trembling. “That’s impossible! You’re lying! You must be pregnant with Lukas’s child-don’t try to fool me!”
By the end, he was almost raving.
I knew then-he didn’t feel remorse. He was just terrified of dying, desperate because he had no time left to find an- other heart.
I looked down at him, slowly picking up a brick from the curb.
“It’s been too long. The law can’t touch you for what you did, and you’re too old to ever see the inside of a prison cell,
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Chapter 9
288 iVouchers
even if they tried.
“So I’ll be your judge.”
I saw Cruz standing not far away. He’d heard everything. Tears streamed down his face as he turned away in silence, pretending he hadn’t seen a thing.
I mouthed a silent thank you to him, then raised the brick and brought it down on the monster’s head. He was too weak to fight back, too weak to even crawl away-so I kept going, again and again, until there was nothing left.
Cruz arrested me and requested permission from his superiors to have me operated on.
But I refused him. “It was selfish of me. I wanted so badly to be happy, to spend whatever time I had left with Lukas, that I lied about being pregnant and went to meet his family.
“If I hadn’t lied, Freya wouldn’t have checked my pulse, she wouldn’t have realized who I was, and she wouldn’t have killed herself.”
Honestly, I didn’t care whether Freya lived or died. She committed her sins, and she deserved to pay.
I just… I just didn’t want Lukas to die.
With regret, I closed my eyes, hoping that in the next life, I’d never be born human again.
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