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Chapter twenty three
publish date:
2026-06-12 19:40:38
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RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty six :
WilliamCadenI stared at the message for a long time.*I'd very much like to speak with my son.*His son.I was somebody's son in a way that had never once applied to Romano — not really, not in any sense that felt true rather than documented. Romano had claimed me, kept me, competed with me, tried to dismantle me from the inside out, and written mine regardless at the bottom of a paternity test he'd buried for twenty-three years.William Ashford had texted me my son in a single line and it landed somewhere Romano's forty-two years of ownership never had."Caden." Aria's voice, quiet. "Breathe."I breathed."He called you his son," she said."Yes," I said."He already knows," she said. "Eleanor told him everything. He processed it and he picked up his phone and he called you his son in the first sentence." She paused. "That's who he is."I looked at the message again.Typed back before the controlled part of my brain could suggest waiting, suggesting timing, suggesting the careful m
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty five:
Finally.AriaI woke up the next morning and nobody had tried to destroy anything overnight.I checked my phone before I was fully conscious, which had become a reflex over the last three weeks — the specific anxious alertness of someone who had learned that mornings could arrive carrying things. Unknown numbers. Screenshots. Recordings. Filing cabinets. Half siblings. Genealogy results.Nothing.Eight hours of genuine nothing.I put the phone face down and lay there in Caden’s bed in Caden’s room with Caden asleep beside me and let the nothing be everything for a few minutes.Outside the window Minnesota was doing something that looked almost like proper morning — actual sunlight, the kind that committed rather than suggested, coming through the curtains at an angle that made the room look warmer than it probably was.I turned my head.Caden was asleep on his stomach, face turned toward me, one arm stretched across the mattress in my direction like he’d been reaching for something in
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty four:
James.CadenI read the message three times.Each time the words stayed exactly the same, which meant I was going to have to deal with them rather than hope they rearranged into something less significant.I think it means I have a brother I didn’t know about. If that’s you, I’d very much like to talk.Direct. Clean. No performance, no drama, just a man in London who had received an unexpected notification and decided the honest response was the honest response.I already liked him slightly. Which was an absurd thing to feel about a stranger whose existence I’d known about for approximately forty minutes.“He moves fast,” Aria said beside me.“He’s an architect,” I said. “They’re decisive.”She looked at me. “You don’t know any architects.”“I know William Ashford designed two significant buildings in the eighties that I apparently studied in a business context without knowing he was my biological father,” I said. “Which is a sentence I need a moment with.”Aria pressed her lips toget
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 Ten
Inside The WallsCadenI found the leak by three in the morning.It took me two hours, a phone call to my head of security, and pulling access logs from the household network that I should have checked weeks ago when Aria moved in and everything in my life started developing cracks.The voice note
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. CHAPTER NINE
Blackmail Tastes Like ChampagneAriaI read the message four times.Does your mother know?Unknown number. No name. No context. Just that screenshot sitting there like a grenade with the pin already pulled and four words underneath it that made my entire body go cold.My first thought was Leah. Bu
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter seven
The CorridorCadenI sent the message before I could talk myself out of it.Room 14. End of the corridor. Ten minutes. Come alone.Then I put my phone in my pocket and went back to nodding at whatever Henderson was saying about the stock market and told myself she wasn’t going to come. She was smar
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter five
CadenI’ve destroyed men for less.Built empires from nothing, buried competitors without blinking, sat across boardroom tables from men twice my age and made them sweat through their suits just by staying quiet. I have never in forty-two years of living lost control of myself. Not once. Not over a
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