Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Today was my daughter Chloe Blackwood’s fifth birthday banquet, and a shriek ripped through the banquet hall.
A strange little boy had lifted the hem of her skirt.
I was about to demand an explanation when my husband, Adrian Blackwood, the man who usually spoiled our daughter rotten, grabbed my wrist hard. “Vivian, let it go. Kids play around. It’s nothing.”
Before I could even process the shock, dense live comments suddenly flooded my vision, tearing open the absurd truth behind this so-called “play.”
My daughter was the heroine of a campus abuse novel, and that boy was the son of my husband’s first love, the male lead in the book.
To make up for the regret their parents had never escaped, Adrian had long since secretly arranged a childhood engagement between the two children.
But I looked at the fear in Chloe’s red-rimmed eyes, then thought of the humiliation and misery the comments had spoiled for her future, and the fire in my chest burned straight through to the bone.
My daughter, Chloe Blackwood, was the only heir to the Bennett and Blackwood families. Since the day she was born, she had been the center of attention, adored and surrounded by wealth and protection.
Even a small fifth birthday banquet had drawn in prominent figures from every circle, which meant Adrian and I had been forced to leave her alone for stretches of time, wineglasses in hand, working the room with the guests.
That was when my daughter, playing by herself in the hall, suddenly let out a terrified scream.
“Ah—!”
Adrian and I rushed over and saw her standing there with her legs crossed, both hands clamped over her skirt. Her pretty face was pale with fear, and tears still clung to her long lashes.
We hurried up to check on her. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
Chloe lifted one trembling finger and pointed at the boy across from her. Her soft voice shook as she choked out, “Mom, Dad, he lifted my skirt!”
What?
I froze.
My head snapped up, and only then did I notice the boy standing there with an easy, swaggering look.
When he saw me looking at him, he didn’t even look ashamed. Instead, he spread his hands helplessly. “I just thought she was cute and wanted to tease her a little.”
“Who would’ve thought she’d be that delicate? She only had her skirt lifted a little and she’s already on the verge of tears. That’s no fun at all.”
He curled his lip as he spoke, the satisfaction and disdain in his tone impossible to miss.
That sent a surge of anger through me. “Whose child are you?”
Chapter 2
I had just started to step forward and question him properly when Adrian suddenly caught my arm. “Vivian, let it go. It’s just kids messing around. No harm done.”
That made my eyes fly wide.
I stared at him in disbelief. This was the same man who usually doted on our daughter, and he was saying something this irresponsible?
A child had been treated like that, had her skirt lifted in public, and he was brushing it off with two words: play.
Was he serious?
Just then, dense live comments began to appear in front of my eyes.
[How did he recognize her? So the dad really clocked it! Back when he first met the mom, it was the same kind of scene.] [Exactly. Back then, the bold and shameless mom flirted with the dad right on the day school started, when he was a senior welcoming new students.] [She lifted the hem of his White T-shirt in front of everyone and even got a hand on his abs. The cool, untouchable dad went red on the spot!!!] [Young hearts, youthful longing. This is way too good.] [And now fate has played the same scene out again, this time on their son and daughter!] [The dad saw the child of an old flame and couldn’t bear to blame the little boy for offending his own daughter, of course.] [Waaah, the love of their parents’ generation really is heartbreaking. Two people that in love, and they still never ended up together.] [At least that love gets to live on in the next generation, or I honestly don’t know how I’d ever make peace with it.]
The live comments surged so fast they nearly drowned out my own thoughts, all of them mourning and sighing over my husband’s tragic first love.
What stunned me wasn’t the fact that Adrian Blackwood had once loved another woman.
What enraged me was that he had actually made my daughter and that woman’s son into a continuation of their love story.
Was this some kind of joke?
How could anything in the world be this absurd?
I didn’t want to believe it. I almost convinced myself the live comments in front of me were a hallucination brought on by stress and exhaustion.
Then the comments started screaming again.
[Ahhh, the mom is here!]
I looked up.
Not far away, a graceful figure had appeared.
When she saw the little boy surrounded by a ring of black-suited bodyguards, she hurried over at once, bent down, and examined him anxiously. “Ethan, are you hurt?”
At that moment, I felt Adrian’s grip on my wrist loosen.
He took an involuntary step forward. “Sylvia.”
The woman stiffened.
She turned slowly, almost blankly, and the instant their eyes met across the distance, her eyes turned red.
My heart dropped straight into an icy pit.
All the last scraps of luck and denial I had been clinging to burst apart in an instant.
Chapter 3
The two of them were so completely absorbed in staring at each other that they seemed to have forgotten everyone else around them.
It was as if the whole room had dropped away.
Only when I smiled and asked, “You know each other?” did Adrian Blackwood finally seem to wake up. He collected his expression at once and said, a little too quickly, “This is my high school classmate, Sylvia Sinclair.”
The woman gave a faint, perfectly timed nod.
[That is so heartbreaking. Two people who used to mean everything to each other meeting again and not being able to admit it. Can’t they really start over?]
The live comments were full of regret over a youth love story that had burned too deeply to be forgotten.
I only felt my own heart sinking lower and lower.
The smile at the corner of my mouth grew colder as I nodded slowly. “An old acquaintance, then? That makes this easy.”
I turned to Sylvia Sinclair. “Ms. Sinclair, your son lifted my daughter’s skirt in front of everyone. Don’t you think you owe me an explanation?”
The second the words left my mouth, the nearby guests all looked over with obvious interest. Murmurs rose around us as people glanced back and forth between the three of us.
Sylvia stood frozen in place, her lips parting once and then again, but not a single word came out. Her face went bright red in an instant.
At last, she looked helplessly at Adrian, her eyes soft and pleading, full of embarrassment.
Unable to bear seeing his old flame cornered, Adrian stepped forward at once. He caught my arm and said in a low voice, “Didn’t we just agree to let it go? It was only a childish prank. There’s no need to make such a big deal out of it.”
“And besides,” he added, “you’re the wife of the Bennett Group’s CEO. Arguing with a child like this doesn’t look good.”
I let out a short, incredulous laugh and shook off his hand. “A prank? What kind of well-raised child goes around lifting a girl’s skirt?”
“That’s not a joke. That’s perverted behavior. It’s completely uncivilized.”
“Are you planning to ignore his manners now and wait until he grows up and starts causing real harm?”
My voice sharpened with every word. I made no effort to soften it, and each sentence hit harder than the last, as if I were nailing Sylvia’s son to a public wall for everyone to judge.
She could not endure that kind of humiliation.
Her frail body seemed to sway like a leaf in the wind, and her voice trembled as she said, “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. Every bit of it. I didn’t raise my son properly. If you’re angry, then blame me instead.”
Her words were addressed to me, but her watery, miserable eyes never left Adrian Blackwood’s face. They were full of grievance and accusation.