9 Chapter 9
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He shamelessly sat at the table next to us.
He clenched his fists as he watched Nicholas and me sweetly drinking champagne with our arms linked.
The moment I playfully fed Nicholas an oyster, Alexander staged a dramatic fall down a short flight of stairs.
In our childhood, whenever he shed even a single drop of blood, I would tear up with heartache and recite the childish spell, “Pain, pain, go away.”
Remembering this, Alexander walked up to me, full of expectation, and said in a hoarse voice:
Blair, look, I’m hurt.”
“So?”
Meeting my cold gaze, Alexander was speechless for a long moment, his eyes unknowingly turning red.
“I’m not faking it to trick you, Blair. I’m really hurt.”
Hearing this, Nicholas put down the knife and fork he was using to cut my steak and looked at Alexander with a mocking
glint in his eyes:
“If you’re hurt, drag yourself to a hospital. My wife isn’t a doctor. And even if she were, she’s under no obligation to treat a piece of trash like you.”
“If you ask me, a bastard like you who would even seduce his own brother’s fiancée doesn’t deserve to live in this world!”
Just as Alexander grabbed Nicholas by the collar, about to throw a punch, a sharp, pain–filled scream suddenly echoed from the far end of the restaurant’s hallway.
A moment later, Nicholas’s men dragged a middle–aged man into the room. He was covered in injuries, barely breathing, and they threw him down at my feet.
The moment the middle–aged man saw me, he collapsed at my feet, weeping uncontrollably: “Madam, I beg you, please spare this worthless life of mine! I… I won’t lie anymore. I admit it was me who deliberately humiliated you on your anniversary with Mr. Knight, and… and locked you in the garage, intending for you to be left for dead inside….
But in the end, I was just paid to do a job! If you’re willing to spare my wretched life, I’ll tell everything I know… everything!”
you
The former bodyguard didn’t just admit to taking money from Madison and her mother to try
9 Chapter 9
and kill me. He went on to reveal other crimes.
Madison had framed me for smashing her mother’s food stall. She did this to stop people from finding out the truth–that her mother was a gambling addict constantly hounded by gangsters for debts.
Alexander’s face instantly turned terrifyingly pale.
He remembered it with sickening clarity: that night, after Madison had tearfully told him her mother’s food cart was smashed.
He’d gotten drunk, rounded up his degenerate friends and some bodyguards, and driven to Blair’s parents‘ graves in Long Island Cemetery.
He’d let them spray–paint the headstones, smash them with hammers… and then he’d watched as they dug up her parents‘ ashes to piss and spit on them.
“Blair, why didn’t you tell me you had suffered such terrible injustice?”
I looked at him with an expression of pure, bitter amusement:
“If I had told you, would you have believed me?”
“Alexander, to be honest, I’m grateful all of this happened before we got married.”
“You know me. I’ve always been a sentimental person.“”
“So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”
“Thank you for letting me see you for what you truly are: a dull, uninteresting monster, utterly unworthy of love.”
Her feather–light words were like barbs, sinking deep into his flesh–and–blood heart one by one. With every simple breath he took, the man could clearly feel the tearing agony of a raw, bleeding wound.
Alexander’s thin lips went white, as if he was still trying to struggle, to offer some kind of
excuse.
But Nicholas, silent for so long, suddenly leaned close to his ear. In a voice only the two brothers could hear, he mercifully told him a secret he had known all along–a secret he had hidden for a full ten years:
“I hear the reason you’ve always had a soft spot for Madison is because she used to visit the hospital in high school to help you care for your mother?”
I never told you this, but there were several times when I was running errands for Dad, bringing soup to your mother, that I ran into that cute flower girl in the cancer ward.”
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9 Chapter 9
“Did you know? That girl is actually a neighbor we’ve known for years. She has a particularly beautiful name. Her name is Blair.”
