He Favored Her So I Took My Patent To His Rival Chapter 06

He Favored Her So I Took My Patent To His Rival Chapter 06

The internal investigation moved faster than anyone expected.

Seven days after Silas’s suspension, the State Supreme Court’s disciplinary team finished its

preliminary inquiry and formally launched judicial proceedings against him.

I learned the details of the review from Adriel.

“The team pulled the full surveillance from the certification office,” Adriel said, sliding a document toward me. “Leah met the lead examiner privately three days before the results

came out. She paid him five hundred thousand dollars in cash. The whole thing’s on tape,

crystal clear.”

I opened the file. Inside, there were also screenshots from the surveillance footage.

Leah smiled as she slid an envelope across the desk. The examiner hesitated, then took it.

“And this,” Adriel added, handing over a disc.

“Backup security footage from your parents’ house. The day Leah went there asking for a

truce, the entire incident with the emerald pendant is on here. She pushed the box to the edge

of the table first, then deliberately knocked it off, and finally used the shards to scratch her

own wrist.”

I stared at the images without speaking.

I already knew all of it-I’d watched it happen.

But knowing was one thing. Proving it to everyone was another.

Silas only ever believed what he saw. And what he saw was always exactly what Leah

wanted him to see.

“There’s something else,” Adriel said, his tone shifting into unusual hesitation. “Ten years ago,

Silas had a terrible fever while studying for the SAT. It hit 105°F, almost frying his brain. It was

deep winter, roads blocked by snow, no hospital had openings.”

My fingers tightened around my cup.

I remembered that day. Every detail.

“It was you,” Adriel said, looking at me with a calm yet heavy voice. “You walked for four

hours through a snowstorm at 5°F, just to buy fever medicine from the only pharmacy still open. But Silas always thought Leah was the one who saved him.”

I’d left the medicine at his dorm door, too frozen to speak.

Leah had walked by, taken it, and knocked on his door.

Ever since, Silas had seen Leah as his savior, his one true love.

My knees still ached when the weather changed, scarred from the frostbite.

I didn’t know how Silas would react if he learned the truth.

And I didn’t want to know.

That night, a heavy storm hit.

I stayed in the apartment Adriel arranged. Thunder boomed outside.

My phone lit up over and over-all missed calls from Silas. I didn’t answer a single one.

At two a.m., the building security called.

“Ms. Thorne, there’s a man downstairs. He’s been standing in the rain for over an hour. We

can’t get him to leave.”

I walked to the window and pulled the curtain aside just a crack.

Silas stood on the steps, soaked through, suit clinging to his body, hair plastered to his

forehead-broken and defeated.

He clutched something tight to his chest.

I stared for a long time before I recognized it.

The scarf he’d given me our first year of marriage. Slate blue. He’d picked it out himself,

saying it matched my white coat perfectly.

That winter, he’d wrap it around my neck twice before I left, tucking the ends inside my collar,

brushing my chin gently.

“Go on,” he’d say. “Don’t catch a cold.”

When he smiled back then, the corners of his eyes would curve into a beautiful, soft arc.

I put on my coat, grabbed an umbrella, and went down.

When he saw me, he stumbled forward two steps, voice hoarse and barely audible.

“Oaklynn… I’m sorry… just let me talk to you, please…”

I stood under the umbrella, watching him, utterly broken.

Then I pulled a photo from my pocket.

In three years of being married, that was the only photograph we’d ever taken together as a

couple.

I tore it slowly, piece by piece, right in front of him.

The scraps fell into the rain, washing away into the muddy drain.

“Don’t dirty my doorstep.”

I turned and walked back inside, his broken sobs echoing behind me.

I didn’t look back.

The next morning, when Adriel came to pick me up, his expression was unusually grave.

“Leah’s asked to see Silas in detention,” he said, opening the car door. “She says she has

something that could bring you down with her.”