The Mistress의 모든 챕터: 챕터 21 - 챕터 30

“You really think you’re going somewhere? You think that little phone and a few broken mirrors make you a threat?” Daniel’s voice preceded him, a ragged, ugly sound that tore through the heavy silence I had been trying to reclaim. He hadn’t left. He had spent the last twenty minutes pacing the hall, fueling his ego with more rage, and now he was back—kicking the door open so hard it hit the stone wall with a crack. He looked unhinged. His shirt was untucked, his eyes bloodshot, and he was clutching a set of papers—the Ridgeview commitment forms. “I’m the one who decides when this play ends, Victoria! Not you. Not Zander. You’re going to that facility tonight, even if I have to drag you there in zip ties.” I stood my ground at the top of the grand staircase, the burner phone clutched in my hand like a talisman. “It’s over, Daniel. The press has the recordings. Every word you said to Avalain… it’s already out of your reach.” “Liar!” he screamed, lunging at me. He grabbed my wrists, h

R-18The antiseptic smell of the hospital was starting to feel like a slow-acting poison. Every time the heavy doors of the ICU swung open, my heart did a frantic, painful stutter, waiting for a doctor to tell me my son’s light had finally gone out. But the machines were steady. The blood—Zander’s blood—was doing its work, fighting the damage Daniel had inflicted.I couldn’t stand the sight of the waiting room anymore. I couldn’t stand the way Daniel sat in the corner, staring at his phone, already drafting a press release about Ethan’s “unfortunate trip on the stairs.” He looked like a man calculating a tax return, not a father waiting for his child to wake up.I turned and walked down the dimly lit corridor of the executive wing, my legs feeling like lead. I found myself at the end of the hall, pushing open the heavy oak door of an unoccupied consultant’s office. It was a dark sanctuary of leather, old books, and the faint scent of rain coming from the cracked window.I didn’t turn o

“It’s not a hunch anymore. It’s a fact.”Zander Blackwood stood by the large, tempered glass window of the hospital’s private lab annex, his silhouette sharp and imposing against the clinical white lights of the hallway. In his hand was a single sheet of paper—the expedited results from the blood samples taken during the emergency transfusion. The paper felt heavy, like it carried the weight of every lie told within the walls of the Aethelgard Estate for the last five years.He didn’t look shocked. There was no wide-eyed gasp or sudden realization. Zander had felt the truth the moment he held Ethan’s limp, fragile body in the foyer of the estate; he had felt it every time he saw the boy’s quiet, observant eyes across a dinner table or from the shadows of a garden. But seeing it in black and white—Probability of Paternity: 99.9%—turned his inner turmoil into a cold, systematic hunger for justice. It was no longer a suspicion he carried in his heart; it was a weapon he now held in his ha

“Sign it, Daniel. It’s the only mercy you’re ever going to get.”Zander’s voice was like a low-frequency hum of a predator, vibrating through the cold marble of the VIP lounge. He had the papers laid out on the mahogany table, the DNA report acting as the heavy weight that should have crushed Daniel’s soul.But Daniel didn’t pick up the pen. Instead, he let out a jagged, hysterical laugh that echoed off the glass walls. He stood up, his face a mottled purple, the cowardice finally curdling into a delusional kind of defiance.“This is ridiculous,” Daniel hissed, his voice trembling but loud. “You think a piece of paper from a lab annex changes five years of law? I am the husband. I am the father on the record. You’re just a ghost, Zander. A ghost who’s been lurking in the shadows for too long. I’m not signing anything. Michael will never believe you—he’ll think you forged it just to steal the chair. Good luck proving this in a court that my father owns.”Daniel straightened his tie with

“You look so much more… peaceful when you aren’t fighting the inevitable, Victoria.”Daniel’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a stagnant well, echoing off the padded surfaces of my prison. I lay draped across the velvet armchair, my head tilted back at an awkward, unnatural angle.I kept my eyes half-lidded, mimicking the vacant, glassy stare of a woman lost in a chemical forest. In reality, every muscle in my jaw ached from the Herculean effort of pinning three bitter, chalky pills against the back of my molars, hiding them in the small, dry pocket of skin beneath my tongue.Don’t swallow, Victoria. If you swallow, you lose him forever, I screamed at myself inside the silence of my mind.My mouth felt like a desert, and the urge to swallow was a physical torture, but I remained as still as a marble statue. The pills began to dissolve slightly, the acrid, metallic taste leaking onto my taste buds. It was a slow poison, a bitter reminder of how much Daniel wanted me