All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

(Ethan's POV)I did not wait for my lawyer's advice before deciding what I wanted to do about the petition. I already knew.Amelia had gone very still reading over my shoulder, one hand resting flat against her stomach in the unconscious way it had started doing lately, a gesture I did not think she was even aware of anymore. She did not tell me what to do. She never did, not with things like this, and I loved her for it even as some smaller, more frightened part of me wished, just once, that she would simply hand me the answer instead of trusting me to find it myself."Agree to it," I told Nathan, phone pressed to my ear, pacing the length of the kitchen while Amelia watched me from the table with an expression I could not fully read yet, exhaustion braided together with something that might have been relief. "The DNA test. All of it. Today, if the lab can manage it. I want this over before it has a chance to become anything bigger than it already is.""You understand what you're agr

(Ethan's POV)"Probability of paternity," Nathan read, his voice flat, careful, the voice of a man reading a sentence he did not want to be the one reading, "ninety-nine point nine nine percent."The number sat in the room like something with weight, something that had physically entered the kitchen and taken up space between us.I did not move.Somewhere in the back of my mind, a small, useless part of me was already trying to do the mathematics of my own life, counting backward through every year, every gala, every business trip, searching for the single missing hour that could explain a number that precise. I found nothing. There was nothing to find, and yet the number sat there anyway, indifferent to what I did or did not remember."That's not possible," I said, and heard how thin it sounded even as I said it, the particular thinness of a denial nobody in the room, including me, fully believed anymore."I know how this looks," Nathan said. "I want to be clear, I have real concerns

"Show me," I said.Olivia sent the breakdown while we were still on the phone, three images stacked on top of each other, the original photograph and two versions beneath it with sections circled in red, the kind of forensic detail that would mean nothing to a stranger scrolling past a headline but meant everything to the two of us standing in that kitchen. "Look at the shadow under his jaw," she said. "It falls at an angle that doesn't match the light source in the rest of the room. And the reflection in the mirror behind the bed doesn't show either of them at all, which it should, given where the camera is supposedly standing. Someone composited his face and Serena's onto a stock hotel photograph and did it well enough to survive a glance, but not well enough to survive someone actually looking.""How well enough to survive a glance is that photograph doing right now, exactly.""It's been shared eleven thousand times in the last hour," Olivia said. "I know how that sounds. I'm telli

Noah's POVMum wanted to hand everything straight to Olivia and let the professionals handle it, and mostly, I understood that. But professionals move at professional speed, and I had already spent an hour after she went back to bed with the employee's name pulled up on my screen: David Reyes, systems administrator, badge photo still smiling out of an old company directory like he had no idea what I already knew about him. It had not been hard to find. His entire digital life was arranged like a scavenger hunt for anyone patient enough to look.I found him myself. Not hard, actually. He posted enough about his gym schedule online that guessing which branch, which morning class, took about four minutes.I did not plan to say anything to him directly. I told myself that the whole drive over, holding onto the plan the way you hold onto a promise you already suspect you are going to break the moment it becomes inconvenient.He was coming out of the gym, hair still damp, gym bag over one s

I did not answer Nathan that night. I answered him three days later, in the only way I have ever known how to answer anything difficult, by doing the thing I had already decided to do before I had fully admitted, even to myself, that I had decided it.Amelia's assistant tried to stop me at the elevator. I told her I would wait as long as necessary, and something in my face must have suggested I meant it, because she let me through with the particular resigned expression of someone who had clearly been warned about me and decided the warning was not worth enforcing today.Amelia looked up from her desk when I walked in, and whatever composure she had been holding together for the cameras and the board and her own son collapsed, for exactly one second, into something raw and exhausted, before she caught herself and rebuilt it in front of me, brick by visible brick."Get out.""I heard about Serena.""I said get out, Damien. I do not have room in this week for you.""You're right." I sta