Chapter 8
“Forget it. I never meant to make you angry about this.”
He shrugged one shoulder, and the bodyguards peeled the groom’s jacket off him and tossed it into the bloodstain.
“Then we won’t hold the wedding.”
The cancellation was like a dropped stone. Its ripples were Audrey’s furious voice.
“Paisley! You bitch! Do you really think he ever loved you? Think carefully, who was the person who kidnapped him back then? I… ugh!”
“Shut up!” Geoffrey snapped. At his command, one of his men clamped a hand over Audrey’s
mouth.
My gun, however, was already pressed against that guard’s head.
Audrey, seeing the man’s hesitation, shoved him away.
“I’m his daughter!” she shouted.
Wait, Audrey claimed to be the daughter of the person who once kidnapped Geoffrey?
“You think Geoffrey was really kidnapped?” she continued venomously. “How laughable. How
could he have let himself fall so low? This was all aimed at you. Those men really had planned to ruin you, and he knew about it from the start. Bitch! You really think he loved you?”
Then, the butt of a gun struck her on the forehead, and she screamed, clutching her head.
I, on the other hand, watched Geoffrey quietly.
“You’ve got nothing to say?” I asked, expecting him to explain.
But he only sighed. “I had my reasons for that time.”
I used to believe he and I were unbreakable. But between his calm and Audrey’s shrieks, the truth came clear to me. Geoffrey had indeed charged into the business world for my sake at first, and I worked alongside him as we clawed our way up. At the beginning, he felt happy. But over time, he discovered I was decisive and ruthless, sometimes so formidable that he had to use my resources to break through.
Love was precious to a man. Career was sacred. When a lover began to draw the attention of powerful people more than he did, that lover became a rival. And how did you stop a lover from becoming a liability? You destroyed their reputation. You ruined their purity. And you made sure she had nowhere to turn but you.
When he staged his kidnapping and set that trap for me, he had already prepared himself for a life without our child. He loved me, but was then disgusted by me, even when the dirt was his doing. He feared me, feared my Independence, yet he had loved me. That was why he refused the divorce, as guilt and control braided together. Those nights alone in his study weren’t only about whether he’d wronged me. They were about how to keep me under his hold.
And Audrey, daughter of his former “partner,” was different from me. She was naïve and pure in a way that made him feel guilty, so he tried, in his own way, to make amends.
Chanter 8
212
RA Q%
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2:06 pm p pas.
Tears and a smile crossed my face. “Geoffrey, after I ‘saved’ you that day, what did you think?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Really?” I leveled the gun at his temple, my eyes cold as steel. “Then die.”
However, the barrel shifted off target as he grabbed my wrist.
Audrey screamed, “Stop! Paisley, you bitch!”
As such, our bodyguards started to clash.
We both refused to back down. He knocked the gun from my hand while I clamped my fingers around his throat. Under my blade, old wounds he’d suffered for me opened again. But the scars I’d kept as proof of my loyalty became his targets in return.
2:06 pm P P.
Paisley’s POV
