I Faked My Death—Now I Have to Tame the Crazy Men I Left Behind-Chapter 97 - 95: Returning to the Grant Family to Settle the Score
Night fell. After getting Mia Grant to sleep, Silas Grant tucked her in and slipped quietly out of the hospital room.
He had already taken off his overcoat, and the suit jacket underneath was slightly wrinkled where the girl had grabbed it. Silas Grant casually smoothed out the crease, the corner of his eye, from behind his glasses, flicking toward the secretary at his side.
Taking the cue, the secretary nodded slightly and stepped forward. "Mr. Grant—"
"Keep your voice down."
The man’s voice was soft. "She just managed to fall asleep. It would be a problem if you woke her."
At this, the secretary immediately lowered his voice. "Mr. Grant, the school’s surveillance footage was deleted. However, we managed to recover the data in time."
The secretary cued up a video, holding his phone in front of him. "According to the footage," he said as it played, "it appears your mother discovered the second young miss was still alive and went to the school specifically to find her. In her panic... she struck her."
The video kept playing. Even on fast-forward, the woman’s vicious words were still clear, rushing into Silas Grant’s ears.
After the slap, the hallway fell silent.
The secretary had already watched the footage twice, but he still couldn’t help but feel a sense of dismay seeing this part again. He cautiously risked a glance at the man before him, trying to gauge his reaction...
Silas Grant’s eyes were impassive. His dark gaze remained fixed on the screen, his expression devoid of emotion.
The secretary thought he would get angry, or perhaps frown—give some sort of reaction. But there was nothing.
Having worked beside Silas Grant for so many years, he knew the man never showed his feelings and was never ruled by emotion. But... the girl getting hit in the video was Mia Grant.
This was the Mia Grant who could make Silas Grant drive back from Portia to Jynsia alone, telling no one, the one he would abandon a high-level meeting and use a restricted access route to return to.
He even believed that in Silas Grant’s eyes, there were only two kinds of people.
People who didn’t matter, and Mia Grant.
’So how could he not react?’
’Did he not see it clearly?’
The secretary considerately reached out. "Let me rewind it for—"
"Don’t touch it." When Silas Grant spoke, the chill in his voice was undeniable.
The secretary froze and snuck another peek.
Still impassive.
But—
The secretary finally noticed the man’s clenched jaw. Upon closer look, under the glaring light of the corridor, a muscle in his face was faintly twitching.
’He was nowhere near as calm as he appeared.’
The secretary sucked in a sharp breath and quickly lowered his head, not daring to look at his face again for fear of inviting disaster.
While he was settling her down to sleep, Mia Grant hadn’t mentioned the incident, and Silas Grant hadn’t asked. But he had already suspected the culprit was his mother.
But suspecting it and seeing it with his own eyes were two entirely different matters.
The patriarch of the Hughes Family had a son and a daughter, and Ms. Hughes was the elder child. She had been spoiled rotten since birth. Back then, her father was still young and hadn’t planned on passing the family business down to his children, so he wasn’t particularly strict with them. This led to Ms. Hughes’s arrogant and willful personality. In her youth, she was lawless and unreasonable, earning her the title of the "Eldest Princess of the Portia Circle."
Silas Grant didn’t have much contact with Ms. Hughes.
Today was the first time he had witnessed his mother’s true colors so viscerally.
In the video, the girl simply froze in place after being struck. Her long hair hid half her face, making it impossible to see her expression.
Chaos erupted around them, a cacophony of colliding voices. Yet she alone stood there, perfectly still, as if her soul had been ripped from her body.
It wasn’t as if Silas Grant had never seen Mia Grant’s fragile side.
He wasn’t some naive boy. He could see through some of her little ploys; he just chose not to expose them, wanting to indulge her instead.
But he knew she was terrified of pain, and that fear wasn’t an act.
The child who would once cry for ages over the slightest hurt, begging for candy, now stood in the storm without a single tear, devoid of all vitality.
She was too docile.
This was how he had always wanted to see her.
For some reason, this scene made Silas Grant deeply uncomfortable.
Perhaps he was just used to her throwing herself into his arms to sob. To see her now, so calmly accepting the woman’s tirade and the stares of passersby... It was like she was standing naked in a crowd, being gawked at as her scabs were peeled back one by one. With her bloody wounds exposed to the sun, she numbly and cruelly dissected herself along with the onlookers, having lost all strength to resist.
His heart felt like a waterlogged sponge being wrung out, and he was gradually suffocating.
Then he saw the girl’s shoulders tremble. She raised a hand to cover her mouth, fingertips shaking violently, but blood still trickled uncontrollably through the gaps between her fingers, dripping... down...
Finally, she collapsed into a pool of blood.
The screen went black.
The secretary was confused, then saw his boss’s hand pulling away from the phone.
"Mr. Grant, where are you going?"
"The restroom."
The mirror in front of the sink lay shattered on the floor.
This was the second time he’d felt this.
The first time was when she jumped into the sea; the second was today.
A sharp pain pierced his chest. His tall frame hunched over, his hands braced on the sink as he struggled to steady his shaking body.
Silas Grant forced himself to forget the images for now. He had to solve the problem.
’I’d assigned men to watch Mia. Why didn’t they appear when she was in danger?’
’I sealed off all news of her. Given Ms. Hughes’s indifferent attitude, how did she even find out Mia exists? My people never detected any sign of her searching for Mia.’
’Serena Grant? No, that’s impossible. Mia’s return wouldn’t benefit her.’
Silas Grant took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to figure out which part of his plan had failed.
Suddenly, he froze.
’Grandfather.’
—
A cleaning lady rushed over at the sound, a scream catching in her throat. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚
His leather shoes crunched over the broken glass. The man elegantly wiped a water spot from his glasses with a handkerchief, then looked up to meet the cleaning lady’s eyes and smiled gently. "My apologies. My hand slipped."
"You can contact me anytime about compensation."
His blood-stained fingertips presented a black and gold business card to the cleaning lady.
When the secretary heard the noise and came over, Silas Grant had already composed himself. He emerged looking as refined and aristocratic as ever, down to the last artfully arranged strand of hair.
Like a duke stepping out of a medieval castle.
He turned to his secretary, the smile in his eyes holding a barely perceptible edge. "Have the car brought around."
The secretary held his breath.
"What about the second young miss?"
"Leave all the bodyguards here. Find a few more nurses to stand guard..."
’Not enough. It’s still not enough...’
Silas Grant frowned.
"Yo, Silas?"
Not far away, Yates Donovan popped up out of nowhere. Dressed in nothing but a bathrobe with a toothbrush dangling from his mouth, he was an odd sight in the hospital corridor.
The secretary glanced around in surprise, starting to doubt his surroundings.
’This is a hospital, not... a hotel, right?’
Silas Grant, however, was sizing him up with a complicated expression. After a long moment, he said, "Yates Donovan, help me keep an eye on things at the hospital."
Yates Donovan raised an eyebrow.
"Where are you off to this late?"
Silas Grant smiled. "Me? Since I’m back in Jynsia, it’s only natural I go home to see my mother."
