Chapter 172: Unravelling
The G-Wagon glided smoothly through the quiet, tree-lined avenues of the city, its dark interior bathed in the soft blue glow of the digital dashboard.
April sat completely motionless in the passenger seat. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, her face turned toward the side window as the streetlights swept across her sharp, pale profile in rhythmic flashes.
She didn’t look at Nat. She didn’t look at the dashboard. She simply stared out into the dark night, completely submerged in an absolute, suffocating silence.
Nat kept his hands relaxed on the leather steering wheel. His eyes flicked toward her every few seconds—first checking the side mirror, then tracking the dark reflections on the windshield, his gaze repeatedly settling on her distant, quiet posture.
For a man who usually filled every silence with a lazy joke or a sharp, teasing remark, he didn’t utter a single word. He simply watched her, reading the unnatural, rigid tension held in her shoulders.
It wasn’t until the vehicle finally pulled up into Xavier’s courtyard, coming to a soft stop on the dark gravel, that Nat cut the engine.
The silence inside the cabin stretched for another heavy beat before Nat turned his body slightly toward her, resting one elbow on the steering wheel.
"Are you alright?" he asked, his deep voice unusually low and quiet in the warm interior.
"Um..." April didn’t look back at him. Her dark eyes remained fixed on the villa’s lit entrance. "I think so."
Nat stayed still, his eyes searching her profile. He could see the frantic calculations spinning behind her unblinking gaze.
"You don’t need to put everything that happened tonight into a box just yet, sweetheart," Nat said softly, his tone completely free of its usual arrogant edge. "She said she’ll come back tomorrow. When she shows up, you’ll get your answers."
April didn’t explain. Nat didn’t know about the system interface, so he didn’t know that a floating, blue diagnostic window had just confirmed a 99.9% Monozygotic Resonance Sync—that the woman named Emily Gabriel was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, her biological twin sister.
Why wouldn’t she think about it? For ten years, she had lived as a maltreated slave under the Morgans, her mind a hollow shell starting at age sixteen.
She had forced herself to accept that she was just an abandoned piece of trash with no past and no roots. But now, a woman with her exact face had appeared out of the shadows, carrying the exact last name April had: Gabriel.
She wanted to understand. She desperately needed to know what had truly happened to her life before she was locked in that hellish household.
Without answering him, April reached out, opened the heavy passenger door, and stepped out onto the gravel.
"Goodnight, sweetheart," Nat called out softly behind her.
April simply nodded, leaving the heavy door to swing shut on its own as she turned and walked straight into the main villa.
The grand foyer was softly lit by warm ambient floor lamps. Just like the night before, Xavier was sitting near the massive mahogany table in the dining hall.
His tablet was resting flat beside a cup of lukewarm tea, his posture perfectly refined, but his eyes were instantly drawn to the entrance the moment the glass doors clicked shut.
When his gaze landed on April, his brows instantly furrowed.
Her shoulders were slightly slumped. The sharp, clinical brightness that usually governed her posture was noticeably absent, replaced by a strange, hollow quietness that made her look remarkably smaller than usual.
Xavier stood up smoothly from his chair, taking a step forward. "April? What happened?"
April stopped near the edge of the dining hall. She looked up at him, her dark eyes looking unusually tired.
"Can we just... sit down for a moment?" she asked softly.
Xavier’s heart instantly tightened in his chest. A sudden, cold spike of anxiety flared behind his calm expression.
He had never heard her ask for a moment to sit down like this. She was always moving, always calculating, always marching toward her next objective with absolute precision. For her to look this lost meant something out of the ordinary had occurred.
"Of course," Xavier said immediately, pulling out the chair directly next to his own. "Come, sit."
April walked over and sat down, resting her hands flat against the dark wood of the table. Xavier settled into the chair beside her, leaning slightly forward, his dark eyes fixed entirely on her face as he waited for her to speak.
For nearly a full minute, April said nothing. The quiet hum of the villa’s air filtration was the only sound in the vast room.
She could’ve just said she didn’t want to talk about it or pretended everything was fine, but it was all jumbling in her chest... confusing her and worrying her. So she wanted to talk about it. And Xavier didn’t rush her to begin.
He stayed quiet and waited patiently until she moved her lips.
"I don’t know how to react," April murmured flatly, staring down at her own pale knuckles.
Xavier leaned closer, his voice dropping into a deep, gentle register. "React to what, April? Did someone attack you at the market? Did Nat’s security detail fail?"
"No," April shook her head slowly, her hair swaying past her cheeks. "No... they didn’t. In fact, an attack would have been much simpler to process."
Xavier’s concern deepened, his fingers tightening slightly against the table. "Then what happened?"
"A customer came to my stall just as we were closing," April began, her voice carrying a rare, fragile cadence. "A woman. She... she looks exactly like me, Xavier."
Xavier’s eyes widened slightly, a subtle wave of genuine surprise breaking his composure. "Exactly like you?"
"Same face. Same eyes. Same nose. Same height," April said, her voice barely above a whisper. "And then she told us her name. She said her name was Emily. Emily Gabriel."
Xavier’s breath caught in his throat. "Gabriel? Isn’t that..."
"Yes," April said, her gaze lifting to meet his sharp, dark eyes. "That is my last name."
"Are you related to her?" Xavier asked quietly.
"I don’t know," April admitted, a faint, bitter breath escaping her lips. She paused, looking away toward the grand glass windows overlooking the estate garden. "I have never spoken of this to anyone... but my memories prior to the age of sixteen are completely gone. Everything that happened before I became a maid in the Morgan household, I remember nothing. My mind is absolutely blank."
Xavier went completely rigid. His eyes darkened with a cold, intense fury aimed at a past he hadn’t been there to prevent. "A memory wipe? April... that is not a natural occurrence."
"I know," she murmured softly. "But... I never really thought about it. I was already suffering as a servant. I was abused, starved, and abandoned. To me, it felt better to forget whatever led me there rather than torture myself trying to recall memories that would only weigh me down. So I never searched for it."
She was opening up.
Xavier watched her in profound, quiet awe. The seer who treated the impending apocalypse like a simple mathematical equation that could be tackled with the right calculations and preparations was sitting across from him, laying bare the raw, bleeding fractures of her human origin.
Despite her razor-sharp mind and her terrifying foresight, at the end of the day, she was still a twenty-six-year-old young woman who had been robbed of her entire childhood.