I Faked My Death—Now I Have to Tame the Crazy Men I Left Behind-Chapter 99 - 97: She Has Belonged to Him Since Birth
"You don’t need to attend the wedding. Just consider the Grant Corporation her wedding gift. I’ll thank you on her behalf." Silas Grant’s expression was serious, and his tone was calm and steady. He wasn’t joking.
He hadn’t wanted to have a complete falling out with his parents before. They all had a tacit understanding and kept up appearances, which was better for everyone. As long as it didn’t affect him and Mia Grant, he didn’t care about anything else.
But now, there was no need for that.
Ms. Hughes glared, her eyes wide with fury. She never imagined such treacherous words would come from her own son’s mouth.
At first, she assumed Silas’s goal was simply to get her to treat Mia Grant better in the future.
The worst-case scenario, she had thought, was that he would make her apologize to Mia Grant.
If it came to that, she would have humored him.
But as it turned out, Silas had never mentioned an apology from start to finish.
’From the very beginning, he was here to settle the score!’
"Silas Grant! Have you forgotten that I’m your mother?!"
"Are you really going to turn on your family for some wild girl? I think you’ve lost your mind!"
Ms. Hughes was hysterical.
No one paid her any mind.
Through the haze of smoke, Mr. Grant looked at the utterly unfamiliar young man across from him. It was as if he were meeting his son for the first time.
When he processed what was happening, Mr. Grant found it absurd. "What do you mean, the Grant Corporation? A wedding gift? Your appetite is far too big."
At his words, Silas Grant slowly raised his eyes to look at him.
Their eyes met, and the father and son looked at each other as if they were enemies.
Silas Grant’s brow twitched, and a slow smile crept onto his lips. "It means exactly what you think it does."
The younger man’s eyes were utterly dead. Mr. Grant stared at him for a long time before he was certain: this wasn’t a threat or a warning shot. He truly intended to "sacrifice" the entire Grant Corporation to Mia Grant.
Realizing this, Mr. Grant’s hand, which was resting on the arm of his chair, tightened. "You’re a Grant. If you had ambitions for the corporation, you could have told me directly. If you had just asked..."
"My apologies, but I have no interest in the Grant Corporation." The son, who had always known his place, cut his father’s struggling words short.
Beneath the crystal chandelier, Silas Grant’s powerful aura was on full display. He lowered his gaze to the figures across from him and said faintly,
"When you do something wrong, you have to pay the price."
"No one can escape it."
His voice was soft, spoken for them to hear, yet it also sounded as if he were talking to himself.
Mr. Grant’s eyes widened. "You’ve had your sights set on the Grant Corporation ever since Mia jumped into the sea?"
In the two-odd months since Mia Grant had jumped into the sea, Silas Grant had spent about sixty days in Jynsia.
At first, it was under the pretext of a new project for the Hughes Family, a collaboration with the Grant Corporation that had him frequently visiting Jynsia. They had thought it was work that kept him there.
’Looking back on it now, he was setting a trap.’
’From that moment on, he had been planning to take the entire Grant Corporation for himself.’
Silas Grant was a man of action who never dawdled. Once he had a plan, he implemented it immediately.
For him to be saying this to their faces now, he must already have victory in his grasp, having seized the Grant Corporation’s lifeline long ago.
Taking a deep breath, even a man like Mr. Grant, who had weathered his share of storms, never expected to be brought down by his own son.
"To go this far for a woman... for the woman who hurt your sister." Mr. Grant sneered. "You keep saying the problem lies with us, that we wronged her. What about you? Are you blameless?"
"Don’t you forget what your relationship is!"
"Are you certain that *we* were the ones who drove her to jump into the sea?"
Silas Grant adjusted the frame of his glasses, the smile in his eyes deepening. "There’s no need to try and provoke me."
"This is me atoning for my sins, is it not?" 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞
"..."
—
For a long time after Mia Grant jumped into the sea, Silas Grant forced himself to stay in Jynsia, just so he wouldn’t miss any news of her.
’He’d always believed she was still alive.’
’She would definitely come back.’
Until the fisherman showed up.
Reality dealt him a crushing blow.
Before that day, he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a long time.
His body was exhausted; his soul and flesh teetered on a dangerous edge.
At the police station, the fisherman showed him Mia Grant’s belongings.
The familiar design, the familiar custom engraving. It was the necklace he had personally selected and placed around her neck with his own hands.
She had loved it and never took it off.
The moment he recognized the necklace, he could clearly feel a strange sensation in his chest and the cold sweat that began to prickle his back.
His consciousness was already blurring, and he couldn’t pinpoint the source of a dull, throbbing pain.
A perfectionist could not accept exposing his fatal weakness under the public eye.
So he used his last ounce of strength to hold himself together and leave, entrusting the remaining matters to his assistant.
He hadn’t made it far from the station’s main hall when his tall frame seemed to buckle, as if crushed by the weight of the ocean. He remembered the fisherman saying her body had been almost completely devoured by fish.
A wave of nausea hit him. He steadied himself against a wall with one hand and coughed up a mouthful of blood.
From behind, he heard his assistant’s anxious voice.
As if just then realizing it, he wiped the pad of his finger across his lower lip, and it came away stained with blood.
He froze, and his first thought was the same as anyone else’s would have been.
’It made no sense.’
’She was just one woman.’
’Why be so upset?’
’An insignificant person was gone, so be it. Just handle her final affairs, and the story could be considered complete.’
’Nothing that couldn’t be accepted.’
He stared at the blood on his fingertip for a long time before the great mountain he’d been carrying finally collapsed, and he fell. In the haze, a dissenting voice rose in his mind.
’She wasn’t an insignificant person.’
’That was Mia.’
’The person who was supposed to marry him, to be the one closest to him.’
’She was family, his lover, the one who, from the moment she stepped into the Grant Family’s home, was destined to be his, to be entwined with him for a lifetime.’
’No one could take her away from him.’
’And if anyone did, he would make them pay the price.’
Before that, no matter how ambitious he might have been, his attitude toward the Grant Family had always been one of disdain.
But it was precisely at that time that the Grant Family began making frantic charitable donations in Mia’s name, attempting to smooth things over and ease their own consciences.
’Since that was the case, why not be more thorough?’
’Only by betting their entire family fortune would it show true sincerity, wouldn’t it?’
—
Mia Grant slept until dawn.
She vaguely sensed someone moving around her bedside, their shadow blocking the sunlight streaming in through the window.
Her eyelashes trembled.
The person noticed immediately and stopped what they were doing.
"Mia... you’re awake?"
Meeting a pair of eyes filled with concern, Mia Grant’s brain short-circuited for a second. "Second Brother? You?"
Mia started to sit up, but a hand pressed on her shoulder.
Hayes Hughes helped her lean against the headboard, and Mia asked impatiently, "How are you feeling?"
Hayes Hughes gave a helpless smile, his line having been stolen. "I should be the one asking you that."
He gently brushed the stray hairs from her forehead. "You have much more color than last night. Are you uncomfortable anywhere else?"
"I’m fine, I’m fine! Did you get here last night?"
A thought occurred to her, and Mia couldn’t help but ask worriedly, "Second Brother, how did you get in? What about... Big Brother..."
Hayes Hughes had just parted his lips to speak when an impolite voice cut in from the side. "I brought him in through the front door, of course."
"..." Mia turned her head to meet Yates Donovan’s teasing gaze.
