Chapter 51: The Devil Fulfilled A Wish
Last Night
The rain tapped rhythmically against the glass of the high-rise restaurant’s private booth.
Valerie walked in expecting a fight. After Damian had stormed out of the estate... leaving both her and their mother shattered by his revelation about the miscarriage... She was carrying an unbearable weight of guilt.
She had turned to Vivian, pouring her heart out about the tragedy. She was confused why she called her suddenly this late at night.
Now, sitting across from her, Vivian put on a tragic, sickening display of sympathy. Her makeup was understated, her eyes sore and red as if she had been weeping for hours.
"Vivian?" Valerie asked, pausing near the table. "What’s wrong?"
Vivian looked up, wiping a stray tear with a delicate lace handkerchief, forcing a small, trembling smile. "Oh, Valerie... Thank you for coming. After you told me about the miscarriage, I was devastated for Damian. I couldn’t bear the thought of him carrying such pain. So I... I had to make sure."
"Make sure of what?" Valerie sat down, her brows furrowing.
Vivian pushed a heavy, unsealed manila envelope across the polished table. Her expression shifted into one of deep, calculated horror.
"I hired a top private investigator to look into the hospital records in the city Anastasia moved to right after the divorce... just to see if there was any way I could understand her medical history better."
Vivian leaned closer, taking Valerie’s hands into her own shivering ones.
"Valerie... she lied to him," Vivian whispered, her voice trembling with tragic disbelief.
"Anastasia is playing with Damian’s emotions. Look at the files. The investigator pulled every single admission, ER visit, and discharge paper from the main city hospital during that entire year after your divorce. Her records are completely clean. There was no pregnancy. There was no miscarriage. She fabricated the whole tragedy years ago just to hold power over Damian and turn him against his own family."
Valerie’s jaw dropped. She yanked the envelope open, her eyes frantically scanning the official-looking hospital letterheads and blank medical logs. The guilt in her chest instantly transformed into a toxic, blinding fury.
"She wouldn’t..." Valerie breathed out, though her trembling hands betrayed her sudden rage.
"She would," Vivian urged, her eyes gleaming with subtle triumph in the dim light. "She’s playing him, Valerie. And if you don’t expose her now, she will completely ruin your brother."
Present morning
The silence in the dining room hung heavy and suffocating, broken only by the sound of Ana’s trembling breath.
Slowly, Ana reached out, her hands shaking as she picked up the cold, printed hospital records from the table. She stared down at the crisp white pages... at the blank logs and forged medical statements declaring her painful past a complete lie.
A dark, hollow chuckle suddenly escaped her lips.
It was a sound devoid of joy, dripping with bitter, soul-crushing grief. Tears welled up in her dark eyes, glistening against her pale cheeks as she clutched the papers tightly against her chest.
"I wish that was true," Ana whispered, her voice cracking with raw, unbearable pain. "God... I wish with all my heart that it was a lie."
She turned her head slowly toward Damian. Her tear-streaked eyes narrowed, glaring at him with a mix of profound betrayal and blinding fury.
"Is this why you brought me back, Damian?" She spat, her voice trembling violently. "To humiliate me every single day? To give me scars even deeper than the ones you left four years ago?"
The fragile warmth of the morning, the quiet intimacy under the shower... it all vanished like smoke, leaving behind the bitter ash of their cruel reality.
She couldn’t take it anymore. The weight on her chest was crushing her.
Turning sharply toward Valerie, Ana took a menacing step forward, her eyes flashing with pure rage. "You think I want to be here, Valerie? You think I want to be anywhere near your family? I would rather die than spend another second with your brother!"
Valerie sneered, stepping up to her with equal venom. "Then stop the act, Anastasia! If you despise him so much, why are you here playing the doting wife? Why aren’t you packing your bags and leaving already?!"
"Because I..." Ana started, the truth bursting at the seams of her composure. "Because your twisted brother forced me into a..."
BANG!
Damian’s massive hand slammed down on the dining table with terrible, bone-shattering force. Coffee cups shattered, silver utensils rattled, and the air in the penthouse instantly turned to liquid ice.
He stood tall, towering over them both, his eyes burning with an obsidian, lethal fury that could freeze a man’s heart.
"Go inside, Anastasia," Damian commanded. Every single word dropped like heavy lead, vibrating with a dark, dangerous promise of violence if she disobeyed. "Now."
Valerie gasped, taking an involuntary step back, thoroughly shocked and terrified by the raw, terrifying aura radiating off her brother. She had rarely seen Damian lose his composure like this.
Ana ran both hands through her hair in pure frustration, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs like a trapped bird. Her entire body shook with an agonizing urge to scream.
She wanted to yell the truth into Valerie’s face... that she was trapped under a suffocating one-hundred-million-dollar contract, that she was being held captive in a gilded cage.
She wanted to scream that she wasn’t the ruthless, gold-digging villain they made her out to be.
Or maybe I am, a dark, insidious voice whispered in the back of her mind. Maybe I deserve every bit of this hell.
Unable to stay in the room a second longer under Damian’s suffocating glare, Ana turned on her heel and fled down the corridor toward the master bedroom, leaving the storm to rage behind her.
Without saying a single word, Damian reached down and snatched the forged hospital records off the dining table.
His hand clamped around Valerie’s wrist in an iron grip.
"Damian! Let go of me! You’re hurting me!" Valerie yelled, her heels skidding against the polished marble floor as he dragged her down the grand hallway toward his private study.
Damian ignored her protests entirely. He shoved open the heavy mahogany doors, pulled her inside, and slammed the door shut behind them, locking out the rest of the world.
He marched over to the concealed wall safe behind his desk, punched in a rapid security code, and yanked the heavy steel door open. Pulling out a thick, leather-bound black dossier, Damian turned and threw it viciously at Valerie’s feet.
The folder hit the floor, spilling pages of private surveillance logs, original medical reports, and detailed receipts across the carpet.
"Look at them!" Damian roared, his dark baritone echoing off the walls. "Look at the real files, Valerie!"
Valerie trembled, her hands shaking uncontrollably as she dropped to her knees, picking up the official, stamped documents. Her eyes widened in utter disbelief.
"After our divorce, I had eyes on Anastasia every single second of every single day," Damian said, his voice dropping into a cold, terrifying register as he paced behind his desk.
"I knew where she slept, where she worked, what she ate, and every suffocating tear she cried. I made sure her whereabouts were completely hidden from the rest of the world... especially from her gold-digging parents, so they could never leech off her again."
Damian pointed a furious finger at the fake papers she had brought from Vivian.
"And those forged records you brought into my house?" Damian sneered darkly. "Anastasia didn’t even live in that city! She was three hundred miles away in a quiet coastal town! How could she possibly be getting checkups at a hospital in a city she never set foot in?!"
Valerie’s mind reeled. Her heart hammered against her ribs, the dark, toxic illusion Vivian had built for her shattering into a thousand irrecoverable pieces. The sheer weight of the truth made her dizzy.
"I... I don’t understand," Valerie stammered, tears of sheer confusion and terror spilling over her lashes as she looked up at her brother. "I don’t understand anything that’s happening! What is going on with Anastasia?! Why are you doing all of this for her?! Why are you protecting her?!"
Damian stopped pacing. He stood towering in the dim light of his study, his obsidian eyes locking onto hers with a dark, suffocating intensity that made the air in the room freeze solid.
"Because," Damian said slowly, every word dropping like a heavy iron vault slamming shut, "keeping her... was our father’s last wish."