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Chapter four
publish date:
2026-06-17 15:45:48
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RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty three:
The Match.AriaThe name on the screen was James Ashford.Caden stared at it for a long moment without speaking, which from Caden meant he was doing something significant internally that hadn’t surfaced yet as words or action.Sophia leaned over his shoulder and read the result.“Half sibling,” she said quietly. “That’s the relationship category. Not parent. Half sibling.”“William Ashford has a son named James,” Caden said slowly. “One of the two children he knows about.”“Which means James Ashford is your half brother,” I said.The sentence sat in the kitchen like something that needed a moment to become real.Caden set the phone down on the counter.Stepped back.Ran both hands through his hair, which was the most unguarded physical gesture I’d ever seen from him, the Caden version of I genuinely don’t know what to do with this.“Two days ago I had one father,” he said. “Who was terrible. Today I have a biological father I’ve never met in Edinburgh and apparently a half brother wh
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty two:
What Romano Kept.CadenSomething that involves Caden directly. Something Caden doesn’t know about himself.I read Sophia’s message over Aria’s shoulder and felt something shift in my chest that wasn’t fear exactly. More like the specific awareness of a man who has spent three weeks uncovering his father’s secrets and has just been informed there is apparently still one more.Of course there was one more.There was always one more with Romano.“We should go back,” Aria said, already turning.“Yes,” I said.She told the others something vague about Sophia needing us, the way she’d gotten very good at saying exactly enough to redirect without alarming, and David read her face and read mine and nodded once and said they’d carry on walking for a bit.We went back.Sophia was at the kitchen table with both laptops open and three separate document windows on the larger screen, her coffee untouched beside her in the way that meant she’d gotten deep into something and forgotten it existed.S
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty one:
Almost Normal.AriaWe got home at noon and nobody tried to destroy anything for three whole hours.I want to document that. Three consecutive hours of absolutely nothing catastrophic happening. No unknown numbers. No smoke. No lawyers calling with emergency motions. No surveillance footage of people who looked like my mother. Just the house, and the people in it, and the particular exhausted quiet of a group of humans who had collectively survived something and were allowing themselves to stop running for five minutes.Leah made lunch.Actual lunch, with multiple components, the kind that required planning and more than one pot, which was her way of saying everything is going to be okay without using any of those words because Leah expressed love through food and always had.We ate at the big dining table. All of us — me and Caden, my mother, David, Margaret, Sophia, Leah. Eight people around a table that had only ever really been used for tense, formal dinners with business associat
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty:
EdinaCadenI drove like I had somewhere to be.Which I did.Aria was in the passenger seat, quiet in the particular way she got when she was building something in her head — not shutdown, not scared, just processing and arriving and deciding. I’d learned to read her silences the way I read balance sheets, each one different, each one telling me something specific if I paid attention.This one said she was furious and had decided to do something about it.Good. Fury was useful. Fury kept you sharp.Sophia was on the phone in the back seat, tracking Catherine’s plates through the last three traffic cameras before the Edina exit, confirming the route. David had insisted on coming and I hadn’t argued because it was his inheritance too and he had a right to be in the room when this concluded.My security team was already ahead of us, two vehicles, moving toward the estate.“She’ll be there before us,” Aria said.“By about eight minutes,” Sophia confirmed from the back. “She had a head st
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter forty nine:
CatherineAriaI read the message three times.Each time hoping it would change. Each time it didn’t.The person who has been feeding Marcus Kane information about your household is someone you brought in yourself.Her name is Catherine Reeves.I put the phone down on the table very carefully, the way you put something down when your hands aren’t reliable, and looked at the eggs I’d just been eating and felt my stomach turn completely over.Catherine.Who had waited twenty-two years to give me my father’s voice.Who had sat across from me in that restaurant with careful hands and wet eyes and twenty-two years of apparent guilt.Who I had personally brought into this house. Into Caden’s space, his kitchen, his security. Who had sat with Margaret in the living room last night building an unlikely friendship while I was upstairs thanking the universe for a quiet evening.Who had been in this house when Marcus filed his motion this morning.Twenty minutes before we’d even known to move.
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter forty eight:
The Morning AfterAriaI woke up and for exactly thirty seconds I forgot everything.No lawsuits. No cameras. No federal investigations or filing cabinets or unknown numbers or smoke from dumpster fires. Just warm sheets and morning light coming through curtains that weren’t mine and the specific, devastating awareness of Caden Voss asleep beside me with his arm across my waist like he’d decided that was where it lived now.Thirty seconds of pure, uncomplicated peace.Then my brain caught up and remembered everything and I decided, firmly, that I was going to ignore all of it for at least another hour.I turned carefully, trying not to wake him.Failed.He stirred immediately, the way light sleepers do, eyes opening slow and finding me before he’d fully arrived at conscious. For a second he just looked at me — no control, no composure, none of the careful architecture he wore through every other waking hour. Just a man waking up beside someone he wanted to wake up beside.“Hey,” he s
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter thirty six
DavidAriaHis voice was rougher than I remembered.Slower. The recording had the ambient quality of a hospital room — that specific hum of machinery and distant corridor sounds, the particular acoustic of a space designed for emergency and not for comfort. But underneath all of that, underneath t
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter thirty five
AriaI stood there holding the envelope for a solid thirty seconds.Leah knocked on the door from the other side. Three cheerful raps, completely unbothered by the fact that I was standing eighteen inches away having a crisis about a piece of paper.“I can hear you breathing,” she said through the
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter thirty eight
VoicemailAriaWe called four more times.Four calls, four voicemails, four times listening to Catherine Reeves’ calm professional greeting and leaving messages that got progressively less calm as the morning wore on. By the fourth one Caden had taken the phone from my hand because my voice was doi
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter thirty seven
JuniorCadenI felt Aria go completely still beside me.Not the tired still of someone who has been awake all night and is running on empty. The specific still of someone whose brain has just received information it doesn’t have a category for yet and is taking a moment to build one.I was driving
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