Chapter 10
The moment Chester moaned Alicia’s name aloud, a wave of disgust swept through the banquet hall like a tsunami.
My mother slapped him across the face.
“You disgusting animal! You’ve crossed every line!”
My father’s voice shook with barely contained fury. “Get out! Go back to whatever gutter you crawled from! As of this moment, you are no longer a Rodney!”
As Chester looked up with a glare of humiliation and anger, I curved my lips into a smile.
“Surveillance, remember? You were the one who taught me that trick, ‘big brother.””
Clutching his bruised face like a rooster defeated in battle, Chester turned toward Alicia.
“Alicia, I’m sorry. This is as far as I can protect you…”
But the girl he’d guarded all these years now stared at him as though he were something vile and rotting.
“Disgusting! Get away from me, you pervert!”
Alicia burst into theatrical sobs, trembling like a drowned flower as she cowered behind my parents.
“Mom, Dad-I didn’t know anything… This was all their doing. I didn’t know a thing…”
She crawled to my feet on her knees.
“Eliza, even though I’m innocent… I know it’s because of me you’ve suffered so much. Please, let me make it up to you-I’ll kneel
if I must, just don’t blame me. Please don’t make me leave… I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
She cried, kowtowing repeatedly, clinging to my parents’ legs, wailing for mercy.
Meanwhile, Chester and Dominic-now restrained by guards-were still pleading on her behalf.
“Eliza! If anyone wronged you, it was us!”
“You have no right to take it out on Alicia! She’s pure, kind, and sweet. She’s never done anything to hurt you!”
I raised a hand to signal the bodyguards to wait.
“This is your so-called ‘kind and innocent’ girl?”
I gestured to the screen, which now played footage of Alicia drunkenly grinding against strangers in a nightclub, her face flushed
with lust, her outfit practically non-existent.
Then the scene changed-another recording, this time from school. There she was, bullying a classmate, her “naïve” face twisted
with contempt and cruelty.
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Realizing she had said too much, she quickly shut her mouth.
William folded his arms and looked down at her with cold detachment.
ane DacK…’
“I told you,” he said, “when Eliza needs something, the Remington family will always back her. Alicia, I do know who you are. Not because of your ‘virtues,’ but because people in our circles talk. We all know the Rodney family has a daughter who lives wild behind closed doors.”
My parents, eyes full of disappointment, turned to me, and I dropped the final bombshell.
“Alicia, do you really expect us to believe you knew nothing about your origins? Then explain these wire transfers.”
When William had helped investigate her background, he discovered that every month, Alicia sent a fixed amount of money to a private account. Tracing it led us to the truth-she had long since reunited with her biological mother.
And under the careful “persuasion” of William’s people, her mother recorded a full confession on video.
“Alicia sends me money every month…
“When we found out the Rodney family had located their real daughter, Alicia told me not to worry. She had a lapdog who would help keep the real heiress from returning…
“But that didn’t work. That girl still came back. I told Alicia we should take what we could and run, but she refused. She said, ‘Why should I give up the entire Rodney family?’
“She even said, if the Rodney couple were dead, she’d still be the only legal heir… She wanted me to apply for a job as their maid… and look for a chance to poison the Rodney couple-and Eliza too…”
The chilling testimony struck like a hammer.
My parents, hearts broken and beyond words, finally made the call to the police themselves.
Alicia and her birth mother were both arrested and charged with multiple crimes.
Without someone to leech off, Dominic was soon buried in financial hardship. Being blacklisted by Singularity was no different than being cast out of the entire industry. He couldn’t even afford his final semester’s tuition-and with no diploma, no future awaited him.
Desperate, he sought out Chester for compensation.
“This is all your fault – yours and that bitch’s! I should be married to the Rodney Group heiress by now! Do you have any idea what that status would mean? You owe me! Pay me back, damn it!”
Kicked out of the Rodney family, Chester had attempted to start his own business, but every venture failed. Dragged down by his already impoverished family, he collapsed under the weight of his own incompetence.
One argument later, the two got into a physical fight and rolled off a cliff.
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Dominic broke his leg and was left permanently disabled. Chester suffered a head injury that left him mentally impaired.
As for Alicia, she died in prison.
It turned out that more than once, she’d tried to bite through her own mother’s throat.
“Why did you turn on me?! You gave birth to me! Why didn’t you take the fall for everything?!”
Eventually, even her mother had had enough. One night, as Alicia went to the bathroom, the woman drowned her in a bucket of
urine.
“This is the ending you deserve.”
I never told my parents what happened. They had already moved overseas to enjoy a peaceful retirement.
By the tenth year of my rebirth, the Rodney Group under my leadership stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Remington Group.
William, who had been pursuing me for years, would sometimes ask with genuine curiosity, “How do you always anticipate market shifts before they happen?”
I lifted an eyebrow. “What if I told you I’ve already lived through these years once?”
He raised an eyebrow back, neither accepting nor rejecting the idea. Instead, he asked quietly, “And in this life, Eliza… are you
happy?”
I was behind the wheel when he asked, my fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel.
“Yes,” I said, smiling faintly. “I’m happy.”
After all, this time, I held my fate in my own hands.
And from here on out, life would only get better.
