I Was Keeping Her Alive While Her Fiancé Tried to Destroy Me Chapter 08

I Was Keeping Her Alive While Her Fiancé Tried to Destroy Me Chapter 08

Winston managed a careful smile.

“Now, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There may be more to this than we know. Once Preston gets here, he can explain everything.”

“Whatever happened, the boy is about to marry into your family. Everything he did, he did for the Bennetts.”

Clara’s grandfather wasn’t buying it. His eyes stayed fixed on the emergency room doors.

“Julian has to pull through. Clara’s aura is fading, and he’s the only one left who can bring her back.”

He turned back to Winston.

“I don’t care about excuses. You know who I am, Winston. If my granddaughter dies, nobody walks out clean. Nobody.”

Winston opened his mouth to respond, but a car pulled up to the entrance and stopped.

Preston stepped out. He looked at the families gathered there, and there wasn’t a shred of guilt on his face, just the proud glow of a man who thought he’d done something heroic.

“Grandfather. Mr. Bennett. Where’s the fraud? I need to…”

His eyes found Leo.

“Leo, that was fast. Where is he? I told you the truth back there and you didn’t believe me. Fine. I’ll prove it right here, right now, in front of everyone.

Leo had just walked out of the emergency room.

The medical team had just given him the news: whatever Preston had injected into me had permanently altered my nervous system. From then on, it left my nerve endings completely raw.

A breeze against my skin would feel like a lit match.

Leo was the toughest person I knew. When the doctors finished, he had to look away.

Now, hearing Preston’s voice out there, cheerful and oblivious, it took everything Leo had not to charge through the doors and beat him unconscious.

Winston read the look on Leo’s face and immediately motioned his own men in front of Preston.

“Preston, just say what you have to say. If you did the right thing, I’ll stand behind you.”

That was all Preston needed. He pulled out his phone, swollen with confidence, and played the recording for the entire room, me on my knees, “admitting” I’d deceived the Bennetts.

He looked at Clara’s grandfather like he expected a round of applause. “I broke whatever hypnotic grip he had on Clara. She’s free now. She won’t have any more episodes. I made sure of it.”

Leo snapped.

“You piece of shit. You forced him to say that! You think I don’t know what you did out there?!”

Clara’s grandfather’s voice went quiet, the kind of quiet that made a room stop breathing.

“All that strutting. All that confidence. And this is what you have to show me?”

“You say you broke his ‘grip’. Then why hasn’t my granddaughter opened her eyes?”

“Julian is the only thing keeping her alive. You didn’t save her. You signed her death warrant!”

The front screen of the conference room flickered on. Clara’s face filled it.

She was pale as paper. She didn’t look like someone sleeping. She looked like someone already gone.

Clara’s grandfather’s composure cracked.

“Whatever Julian needs, anything, everything, you give it to him. He does not die. Do you understand me?”

Arthur, the driver, burst through the doors. He dropped to his knees in front of Clara’s grandfather, pointing straight at Preston.

“Chairman Bennett, that man is a monster. He found out Julian had been at Ms. Bennett’s side for three years and lost his mind with jealousy. He held a blade to me, forced me to drive into Blackwood Pines, and then he beat Julian half to death!”

“Julian only said what he said to protect Ms. Bennett! He knew if things got worse, she’d die faster. He agreed to everything, the confession, the humiliation, all of it, just to buy her time!”

“And after Julian dragged himself to Preston’s feet, after he gave Preston everything he asked for, Preston broke the totem anyway. Crushed it under his boot. The one thing that still had a chance of keeping Ms. Bennett alive!”

With every word Arthur spoke, the room got colder.

Clara’s grandfather slammed both hands on the table so hard the glasses rattled.

“Winston. Nobody from your family leaves this building until I say so. Not one person.”

Winston went pale.

He shot a look at Preston, who was beginning to look afraid for the first time, and chose his next words carefully.

“Surely you don’t actually believe in all this mystical garbage? Psychic tethers, auras. It’s voodoo bullshit.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that this Julian might be the one who made her sick in the first place?”

Preston jumped in.

“Exactly! If Clara hasn’t woken up, it’s because I didn’t finish the job. Let me go back in there and drag the rest out of him. I’ll make him undo whatever he did!”

“ENOUGH!” Clara’s grandfather was on his feet.

The look in his eyes could have stopped a heart.

He was the only one in the room who knew the full truth. Clara’s condition had started when she was a little girl.

When she was small, it had only been occasional episodes, brief blackouts, moments where she’d seem to slip away. The day she turned eighteen, it turned into something else entirely.

I was Clara’s age. I’d been a child myself when her illness began. The idea that I’d been running a scam on her back then was absurd.

When things got desperate, it was Clara’s grandfather who’d found me himself. He’d come to me and asked, practically begged, for my help.

Only then did I agree.

To the Bennetts, I wasn’t a servant. I was the person who kept their granddaughter alive.

And now this man, this outsider, was calling me a fraud.

No wonder his fury had no limit.

Clara’s grandfather locked the building down. Every Sterling executive, every associate, every person who’d come with Winston, none of them left. The whole day passed with them trapped inside.

I didn’t open my eyes until the next morning.

Somewhere in the blur of treatment and sedation, I dreamed of Clara.

She told me to hold on. She said if the odds were too slim, I shouldn’t throw my life away for her.

I reached for her. She pulled away.

Then the dream shifted, and the spiritual guru was there.

He showed me a way to save her.

But it would cost me my life.

I thought of Clara’s smile, wide open, unguarded, the one she only wore when she forgot anyone was watching.

For three years, we’d never been more than thirty feet apart.

Every meal, every night, every fever, I was there.

I’d become part of her world. She’d become my whole world.

She called me Julian. I called her Clara. That was enough.

I didn’t want to lose her.

So the moment I opened my eyes and saw Clara’s grandfather standing over me, I said the only thing that mattered.

“I think I can still save her.”