The Stepbrother’s Wager Chapter 05

The Stepbrother’s Wager Chapter 05

By the time Ethan raced into the airport, dawn was breaking.

Travelers streamed through the terminal as he called me again and again, but every attempt ended with an automated message saying my phone was turned off.

Dylan followed close behind, his expression grim.

“She can’t have really left. She has nowhere else to go.”

The moment he said it, he froze.

It was true that I had never had anywhere else to go before.

No matter how badly they humiliated or hurt me, I had always returned to the Whitmore estate.

This time, I was gone.

An announcement confirmed that the flight to Helsinki had already departed.

Ethan stood before the terminal windows as his eyes slowly reddened.

He took out his phone and opened the video he had secretly recorded.

After watching for barely a second, he shut it off as though the screen had burned him.

Only then did he understand that what he had recorded was not a trophy.

It was the last piece of trust I had given him.

Dylan suddenly seized him by the collar.

“Who leaked the photos?”

Ethan’s gaze turned dark.

“I didn’t leak them. I regretted filming the video as soon as I finished.”

“Claire borrowed my phone that day.”

The two men exchanged a look, then immediately headed back to the hospital.

Claire was in her hospital room, holding an ice pack to her face.

The moment she saw them, she put on a wounded expression.

“Dylan, where did you two go?”

Dylan strode over and snatched the phone from her hand.

Claire’s face went pale.

“Dylan, what are you doing?”

Hidden in her photo gallery were records showing that the images had been forwarded, along with screenshots of her conversations with someone else.

[Did you post the photos to the campus message board? Put her phone number online too.]

[Hire a few guys to scare her. Just make sure no one gets killed.]

The veins stood out on the back of Ethan’s hand when he read the final message.

“You hired those men?”

Claire shook her head as tears spilled down her face.

“I only wanted her to leave. She never should’ve come back in the first place!”

“I used to be the only one either of you cared about. Why did you start paying attention to her the moment she came here?”

Dylan stared at her, his voice hoarse.

“So you dropped the pendant on purpose too?”

Claire bit her lip and said nothing.

Her silence was answer enough.

Dylan suddenly raised his hand and slapped himself across the face.

Everyone in the hospital room froze.

It was as if he had only just come to his senses.

From the moment I entered the Whitmore household, Dylan had blamed every ounce of his pain on

He had forced me to kneel, locked me in the basement, stolen my mother’s keepsake, and eventually destroyed it with his own hands.

But what had I ever done wrong?

My only crime was being born.

Ethan called his assistant.

“Turn over everything we have on everyone who shared those images to the police. Find every man

Claire hired and report them too. Don’t let a single one slip through.”

All the color drained from Claire’s face.

“Ethan, you can’t do this to me. We grew up together!”

Ethan looked at her without a trace of warmth.

“Then you should know better than anyone how much I hate being manipulated.”

Claire screamed at him.

“Why are you acting like some devoted lover now? You were the one who took those pictures!”

“When Dylan asked you to trick her, didn’t you agree?”

Her words struck both men like a knife.

She was right.

Even if they had not leaked the images themselves, they had been the ones who set the trap in

motion.

They had placed the weapon in Claire’s hands.

They had no right to shift all the blame onto her.

Dylan staggered backward.

Memories began flooding through his mind.

The first time I had tried to reach out to him as a sister, my voice had been barely above a whisper.

That day, he had locked me outside until my face turned pale from the cold. Even then, I had held out my scarf to him.

“Dylan, it’s cold outside.”

Later, when he came down with a fever, I secretly made him chicken soup and left it outside his

door.

He said it was disgusting and threw the whole thing away, bowl and all.

Yet the next day, another warm bowl of chicken soup appeared in the kitchen.

He had always assumed I was only trying to win him over.

Only now did he realize that I had simply been clinging to the last instinctive hope that he might one day treat me like family.

Dylan’s voice was raw.

“Investigate what happened back then. Find out the truth about Ivy’s mother.”

Fear suddenly took hold of him.

He was terrified that he had spent all those years hating the wrong person.

He was terrified that I had never done anything wrong at all.

Two days later, the results of the investigation were placed in front of him.

Mr. Whitmore Sr. had been unmarried when he and my mother fell in love.

The Whitmore family later forced them apart because they wanted him to marry a woman from another powerful family.

My mother did not discover she was pregnant until after Mr. Whitmore Sr. had married someone

else.

She never tried to interfere in his life, never asked him for money, and raised me on her own.

Dylan’s mother had not taken her own life because of my mother.

She had struggled with depression for years.

What finally broke her was Mr. Whitmore Sr.’s emotional neglect and the Whitmore family’s suffocating control.

By the time Dylan finished reading the report, he looked as though everything inside him had been

hollowed out.

He sat alone in his home office from dusk until late into the night.

A photocopy of my mother’s journal lay on the desk before him.

The final page read:

[If Ivy ever returns to the Whitmore family, I hope they won’t make her suffer.]

[The child did nothing wrong.]

Dylan covered his face with both hands, his shoulders shaking violently.

But by then, his remorse could no longer reach me.