The Day He Learned the Truth, I Was Already Dead Chapter 08

The Day He Learned the Truth, I Was Already Dead Chapter 08

One deep winter night, Brandon suddenly received an anonymous email, which contained a packed thread of videos.

He did not think much of it and tapped play. Only a few seconds in, his breathing seized.

On the screen, Ava had been the one who shredded her own dress.

She had been the one who hurt herself, and she had been the one who jumped.

The hideous viciousness of Ava in the video made Brandon feel as if he didn’t know her at all. He kept watching, video after video, until he hit the footage from five years ago, the day of Ava’s birthday.

Ava stood there, giving malicious orders to the traffickers. “When you see my brother, you will swear Sylvia hired you to kidnap me. Do it right, and I’ll make sure you never worry about money again.”

The rest was everything Brandon had lived through. His world caved in without making a sound.

So… he had been wrong about Sylvia all those years? Sylvia hadn’t been the one attacking Ava. Instead Ava had been the one crushing Sylvia the whole time?

Then what had he done to Sylvia all these years? What were his eyes for? Why hadn’t he noticed?

His eyes flooded, and he started slapping himself hard, again and again, like pain could undo the past. It was his fault, all his fault! Then he broke down, grabbing a knife from the desk and driving it into his wrist.

When he opened his eyes again, he was in a hospital bed. He stared up at the ceiling, empty and silent. His secretary stayed by his side the whole time, as committed as ever.

For several days in a row, Brandon just stared straight at the ceiling, unmoving. His secretary finally forced him outside, afraid he’d lose his mind.

Brandon walked like a puppet, letting himself be guided through the park. That was when three thick-built men approached, holding out a photo.

“Hey, man, you seen this chick?” one of them asked. “Our dumb girl got loose and wandered off.”

Brandon looked at the photo, and his heart stuttered. It was Sylvia!

In the picture, she was trapped in a cage, covered in wounds, her eyes blown hollow with hopelessness.

My soul shook so hard I felt like I was coming apart, because those men were my nightmare, the devils who had made my life a living hell. I curled in on myself, small and instinctive, even though I had no body left to protect.

Brandon stared from the photo to the men. They weren’t the same traffickers he’d paid five years ago!

Back then, he’d handed over money because he wanted Sylvia to “learn hardship,” not be destroyed. So why were there different men hunting her now?

Brandon’s dead eyes flickered with the first spark of something like life. He motioned once, and his bodyguards moved in, slamming the men to the ground and hauling them away.

Minutes later, they were in the Wilcox basement. Brandon stood over them with a knife in his hand. Every time he spoke a question, he stabbed one of them in the thigh.

“Why were you looking for her?”

“How did she end up in your hands?”

“If I find out you’re lying, your filthy lives end here today.”

They broke fast. Between screams, they spilled everything.

“Ava paid to replace the original crew,” one man sobbed. “She paid both of us, a huge amount, and she told us what to do!”

They described what they’d done to Sylvia, detail by detail, like they were listing chores. Brandon’s face emptied out, and his soul looked like it cracked straight down the middle.

So that day outside the private club, when Sylvia had been stuffing broken cake into her mouth, she hadn’t been “acting.” She had been starving because she’d just escaped.

And the night on the yacht, polishing shoes on her knees, she hadn’t been trying to “get attention.” She had been trying to buy herself a burial plot.

She had been sick enough to be dying, and he had still crushed her, again and again… Thinking of this, Brandon broke down even further.

He gave one order, voice shaking with violence. “Bring Ava here.”