Marcella looked panicked. She held Jacob’s arm and kept saying, “It’s yours! Jake, the baby is yours!”
The little boy was crazily punching Jacob on the side.
Jacob sneered and yanked the little boy’s hair.
“Two years have passed, how come I never thought about a paternity test?”
Marcella’s face went pale.
By this moment, what did Jacob still not get? From start to finish, he got totally played by Marcella!
For a woman he didn’t love, for a bastard child, he hurt the woman he loved most and killed his
Fold Up own flesh and blood!
A Thousand Needles
The anger in his chest suddenly burned through his last bit of reason.
“Go!” Jacob grabbed Marcella’s wrist, ignored the kids yelling nearby, and dragged her hard toward the basement under the stairs.
Jacob picked up the barbed leather whip, still stained with my dried, patchy blood.
He lashed it at Marcella. The tip sliced through the air with a sharp, eerie whistle, mixing with
Marcella’s screams.
There was a fire in his heart, and outside the flames was a layer of ice.
He was like a trapped beast, he didn’t know what to do. He just kept whipping Marcella over
and over.
By the time he got tired, Marcella was already covered in wounds and barely alive.
He crouched in front of Marcella, wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth with his fingertip, and his eyes were scary gentle.
“Now, let’s have a good talk. You and your ‘son’-just how much did you two lie to me?”
I might really not have been the biological daughter of the Zimmer family, because Ryan and Cathy were always sneaking looks at me.
Matthew Simpson was a doctor from another hospital, but for some reason he got transferred here and became my attending physician.
The most important thing was, lan clearly knew about it, but didn’t stop it.
That day, lan pushed me to the little garden for some air.
I saw Ryan and Cathy in the distance, secretly watching me and wiping their tears, and I reminded lan, “Mom didn’t like that.”
At the underground auction, when Cathy asked about the birthmark on my shoulder, my mom was obviously very resistant.
lan said “Mm,” and after a moment added, “I was a bit selfish.”
Selfish? Did him just want to send me back?
I stared with wide eyes.
“Now you
think I took your mom’s love? And your dad’s love, grandpa’s love, grandma’s love
too?! You can’t wait to kick me out?”
lan nodded again, squatted in front of me with a smile, and looked up at me.
I was stunned by how handsome his face was.
My ears suddenly felt a bit hot, so I could only put my hands on my hips and say ev “I’m telling you, it’s too late!”
Fold Up
lan tilted his head, like he found me cute, the corners of his mouth lifting a bit.
“So fierce and adorable.”
He doted on me, got up, and rubbed my head again.
I closed my eyes, tried to dodge real quick. Right when he turned his head, I noticed he looked a lot like Jacob from the side.
Or more like, Jacob looked like him. Like how he was four years ago!
“What’s wrong? Why are you closing your eyes? I’m not ugly!”
lan rubbed my face.
“Open your eyes and look at me, I don’t believe your eyes are empty!”
I snapped my eyes open. Sure enough, I wasn’t staring into emptiness-my bright eyes were reflected in lan’s deep, lake-like eyes.
My heart suddenly went wild.
“What was there to be afraid to look at? Wasn’t it just ‘you’re making a scene, I’m laughing’?”
lan smiled politely and leaned down to kiss my forehead.
My heart was pounding.
In the distance, Matthew saw this happen, instinctively ducked behind the corner, then laughed.
This thing was really complicated.
My heart pounded and felt complicated when I faced lan.
Jacob’s side profile looked about seventy or eighty percent like lan’s, which was also
complicated.
What made it even more complicated was that when I opened my phone cloud drive, I found
that more than half of the photos saved there were lan’s.
Reading, playing basketball, fishing, fighting, grocery shopping, eating popsicles… and a lot of photos of me and him together.
Instead, there were very few photos of Jacob, and the few were all taken from the side. He was sitting in the study or on the sofa, and I happened to take the shot from a very familiar angle.
I remembered that year. I ran to the stage with a bouquet in my hands, and when Jacob turned his face to take the flowers, his face suddenly overlapped with lan’s face in my memory!
I almost fell hopelessly in love with him.
So, what I thought was hitting it off at first sight was just my subconscious looking Fold Up someone else?
So, what I thought was loving him to the bone was actually me secretly loving another person through him?
This realization really broke me.
I leaned against the head of the bed and covered my face.
lan was so nice to me, just pure sibling feelings, but I actually had feelings for him! I was so messed up! lan could never find out about this!
And all those crazy nights with Jacob, deep down, who was I really?
“Ow! Oww!” I couldn’t help but scream.
“What are you yelling about?” lan came in with some water.
I quickly grabbed my phone and hid it under the covers. He couldn’t see it!
“What are you hiding? Is there something
“Just… just… look at guys with abs, improve your taste!”
S……..look at guys with abs, improve you?” he asked casually, but I panicked
“Jacob didn’t have abs?” lan turned his head and casually took off his shirt.
“You’re so pathetic, you even have to look up abs online. Here, touch them yourself.”
Bronze skin, eight-pack abs sharp like they were carved, and the V-line running down from the
waist showed faintly in the light.
I was a little thirsty. He had already walked to the bedside.
“Once you’ve seen something good, you won’t settle for less anymore, right?”
The rising tone at the end sounded inviting.
I reached out and touched it. The firm abs felt like tight silk, with a burning heat.
“How did it feel?” There was a hint of a smile in his voice.
My fingertips just unconsciously touched the scar near his heart. The ugly wrinkle looked like a lurking centipede, and it made my heart ache.
“When did you get hurt?” I looked up, my voice going soft without me noticing.
lan lowered his eyes and looked at me. His eyelashes trembled a little, and there were emotions in his eyes that I couldn’t understand.
After a while, he reached out and messed up my hair.
“Sorry, I scared you.”
“Last year in the Golden Triangle, their firepower was pretty strong.” Said in a casua was fine a long time ago, it just looked scary, I won’t scare you anymore.”
Fold Up
“What about other places?” My throat tightened, and I could barely speak, “Are there any other
injuries?”
“No.” He answered quickly and turned to put on his clothes.
Liar!
I already saw it, there was clearly a palm-length scar on his back, right on his shoulder blade!
“Be more careful when doing tasks in the future, and tell your family if something happens.”
“Got it, thanks for caring.”
He turned around with a smile, my head again, and said with a grin.
“But this is a medal, a man’s medal.”
When Matthew checked on my condition for the Nth time, he noticed that my attitude toward him had become cold.
He was silent for two seconds. “You knew?”
There was another second of silence. “About Marcella, sorry, my family spoiled her. Mainly it’s my fault, I didn’t do my job as a big brother.”
I actually understood. When I found out Marcella was their adopted daughter, and that their real daughter got lost not long after she was born, I understood. They put all the love and guilt they had for their real daughter onto the adopted one.
“I wanted to ask, have we met before?”
