Chapter 10 #3
Emerald shook her head. “No.”
“He wrote every fucking detail.”
My words sounded sharper than I meant them to. The lingering violence inside me made my tone gruff, as if it weighed on every word. Emerald stepped backward slowly like distance alone might somehow change what she’d just heard.
“No,” she repeated weaker this time.
I watched her breathing turn uneven. Her eyes moved toward the journal in my hands before quickly looking away again like she physically couldn’t bring herself to stare at it for too long.
“What do you mean he took her?” she asked finally.
The question barely sounded like her.
“He was obsessed with Cecilia before and after she married Alexander,” I said carefully. “Lucien believed she should’ve chosen him instead.”
Emerald looked horrified.
“He blamed Alexander for it. Wrote about him constantly. Like he stole something Lucien believed belonged to him.”
“That’s insane,” Emerald cried.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“No, like actually fucking insane.”
I laughed once. Not because anything was funny. Although, if I didn’t laugh right now, I was genuinely afraid of what I might do instead.
Emerald quickly caught on, her eyes narrowing. “You’re angry.”
The understatement almost would’ve been funny under different circumstances. I looked toward the fire again .
“He was already killed,” I said quietly. “Right now, it doesn’t feel like enough.”
The room fell silent. Emerald stood frozen several feet away from me, trying to process information no person should ever have to hear about their family.
Then her eyes moved slowly back toward the journal again. “I want to read it.”
“No.”
Her gaze snapped toward me instantly. “No?”
“You do not want those words in your head.”
“How do you know what I want?”
“Because I read them.”
“And?”
“And I wish I fucking hadn’t.”
Emerald crossed her arms tightly over herself now, almost like she was trying to physically hold herself together.
“You’re scaring me.”
Something about hearing those words from her nearly split me open. Emerald rarely admitted fear. Even when she was terrified, she usually buried it beneath sarcasm and attitude. The fact she said it out loud meant this had already gotten beneath her skin deeper than she wanted .
I stepped toward her slowly.
“Listen to me carefully,” I said evenly. “Lucien was a monster. Nothing you read in there changes who you are.”
Her eyes searched mine instantly. “Why would you say it like that?”
Fuck. Too late. Way too fucking late.
Emerald saw the hesitation cross my face, and immediately everything sharpened in her expression.
“Nikolai.”
I stayed silent.
“Nikolai.”
“Drop it.”
“What else was in the entry?”
“Nothing you need to know.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“No, it’s not!” Her voice cracked sharply through the room. “You’re acting weird. ”
I looked away again. My thoughts were moving too fast now. The possibility kept circling inside my head no matter how hard I tried shoving it away.
Eighteen years ago. Pregnancy. Termination. Emerald. No. No fucking way. Except the timing fit too perfectly.
Emerald took another step closer toward me. “What are you not telling me?”
I swallowed once before answering. “He wrote that Cecilia became pregnant afterward.”
The atmosphere froze; Emerald gazed at me without expression. Then slowly, very slowly—
“What?”
My grip tightened harder around the journal. “He believed she terminated the pregnancy.”
I watched confusion move across her face first. Then calculation. Her lips parted slightly. The second it clicked for her, I saw the exact moment the blood drained from her face.
“No,” she whispered. I didn’t answer. Her eyes widened. “No.”
This time, the word was harsher. As if she could force reality backward through denial alone. My pulse was pounding violently now. Emerald looked at the journal, then at me. Then back at the journal again .
“The date,” she whispered.
Fuck.
I remained entirely motionless.
“The date,” she repeated louder now. “How long ago?”
“A little over eighteen years.”
There was a moment of quiet. I gave her the journal to take a look for herself. I observed as the realization dawned upon her with complete clarity. She took another step backward.
“Oh my God!” The words barely sounded real. “No,” she said again, shaking her head rapidly now. “No, no, no!”
I moved toward her instinctively. Emerald pointed at me immediately.
“Don’t!” She screamed. I froze. She ran her hands through her hair, her breath unsteady.
“That’s not possible. That’s not fucking possible!”
“I know,” I said trying to remain calm.
“But if she didn’t terminate—”
“She could’ve lied. ”
The atmosphere in the room altered at that point, though there was no apparent change to its physical arrangement.
The fire continued to burn steadily nearby.
Rain persisted against the large windows, and thunder echoed through the surrounding mountains.
S omething fundamental cracked open between us anyway .
Something that could never be put back the way it was before.
Emerald stood across from me clutching Lucien’s journal against her chest hard enough the leather bent beneath her fingers. Her breathing sounded shallow. As if every inhale scraped painfully through lungs that suddenly didn’t know how to function anymore.
“That’s not possible...”
The words were fragile, almost falling apart.
There was no anger or drama—just pain. I kept quiet, understanding how destruction could unfold in silence.
This kind of devastation starts softly, slowly emptying people from within before they even notice they're hurting.
Emerald shook her hea d . Blonde hair fell wildly around her face while panic slowly poisoned every inch of her expression.
“No,” she whispered, almost pleading with herself now. “No. That doesn’t make sense.”
Lightning flashed beyond the windows, illuminating the room in a violent burst of white before darkness swallowed us again.
“But if she didn’t… ”
As soon as I articulated the statement, I felt immediate regret. Not due to its lack of truth, but because I observed it cause distress within her.
The journal trembled slightly in her hands before she ripped it open again, flipping through pages with frantic movements that lacked any real direction.
She wasn’t reading anymore. She was searching.
Desperate for one line buried somewhere inside Lucien’s madness capable of undoing what had already taken root inside her head.
“Emerald.” She ignored me entirely.
“My mother almost died having me.” She spoke in a subdued manner, appearing distracted, as though the recollection had arisen involuntarily.
“Roman told me that once.”
An uncomfortable sense of unease formed in Emerald's chest. She paused, carefully reviewing Lucien’s handwriting as her gaze moved quickly across the page.
"I can't truly remember her," she admitted, feeling her throat constrict. "Only fragments remain."
Another page turned. Her hands were shaking now.
“A perfume she wore. Sometimes a song.” Her breathing faltered. “That’s it. ”
Grief connected to forgotten memories carried a unique cruelty, forcing you to mourn those whose faces and stories had faded beyond recognition.
Emerald’s voice dropped lower. “I barely remember my father Alexander either.”
That hurt worse, because Alexander Deveraux had loved her in the kind of obvious way impossible to fake.
The entire fucking world would’ve seen it if Emerald would have been in the public eye.
But I had seen it in pictures in the Deveraux estate.
Alexander was the complete opposite of everything Lucien was…
and suddenly the possibility of Lucien touching something that belonged to Alexander felt filthy enough to make violence rise inside me all over again.
Emerald stopped turning pages abruptly. Every muscle in her body locked. I watched her eyes fix on something near the bottom of the journal while all remaining color slowly disappeared from her face.
“What if he’s my father?”
The question carved straight through the room. Lucien, dead and somehow still managing to rot everything around him.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. There was no comfort inside truth. No reassurance strong enough to erase the possibility now coiling itself around both our throats.
Emerald stared at me like she expected immediate denial. Like she needed me to laugh and tell her she’d lost her fucking mind, but I couldn’t. The second she realized that, her expression crumpled in a way that made something brutal twist inside my chest.
“No,” she whispered again. This time, it was smaller—so delicate that its sound immediately made me despise it.
“I had a father!” The words were spoken promptly, with conviction, even as her eyes welled with tears.
“Alexander was my father!” I remained quiet, as familial ties seemed insignificant when weighed against the regard Alexander had shown her. Even if the accusation proved accurate, Lucien Voss could not serve as an adequate substitute. Ever.
“My father loved me!” Her voice faltered midway, and that pain cut even deeper than her panic.
Beneath everything, it wasn’t really fear of biology—it was an overwhelming sense of grief, the kind that feels impossible to bear.
She recognized that the only individuals capable of answering these questions had been deceased for years, leaving her to navigate her life under the assumption that she fully understood her own identity.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
The journal pressed tighter against her chest. Thunder shook the estate hard enough to vibrate through the floor beneath us.
“Roman would know.” Emerald said at first with confidence .
The words emerged automatically—quick and unfiltered—as if her spirit sought him out before her thoughts even registered. Soon after, hesitation set in. I witnessed the shift as it happened: a faint crack appeared in her face, and uncertainty began to take hold.
“He would tell me,” she said softly.
It seemed uncertain, since neither of us knew what Roman knew. Lucien collected secrets the way other men collected power, and secrets buried by dead men had a way of poisoning everyone left alive.
I moved toward her carefully. “Emerald.”
She backed away instantly. “Don’t.”
The single word cracked sharply between us. Panic was consuming her now. I could see it in the way her focus kept slipping. In the way her breathing staggered unevenly like her body itself no longer knew how to hold all the thoughts tearing through her at once.
“This changes everything.”
“No.”
“How does this not change everything?”
The pain in her question was sharper than any scream; she sounded completely lost. She realized something else and immediately looked at me, making the room feel tense.
I knew where her thoughts had gone because mine had already gone there the moment I read Lucien’s entry .
I’d just refused to let myself directl y accep t it.
“Nikolai…”
Every muscle in my body tightened violently.
“Don’t.”
My command was sharper now, icy and harsh. Speaking it made the truth tangible—a reality that neither of us could endure once it was voiced.
Emerald looked horrified now. Not at herself. At me. At us. Lucien was my father. He raised me. Controlled me. Spent years carving obedience into my bones until violence became more familiar than affection ever was. I had no memory of a mother. Lucien was all I ever had known.
Then gently, so quietly that it almost tore something deep within me—
“I kissed you. Hell we fucked each other!”
Fucking Christ.
I closed my eyes briefly. Not from shame. From the savage violence of what those words did to me. My mind betrayed me instantly.
Her mouth beneath mine. The taste of her. My hands against her skin. The sounds she made when restraint started slipping from both of us .
Every possessive instinct inside me still answered to her exactly the same way, and realizing that now felt like swallowing poison.
Emerald looked sick. Like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin.
“No,” she whispered again, backing away further now. “No.”
“It’s not confirmed.”
“But what if it is?”
I had no answer. For the first time in years, I genuinely had no control over what happened next.
Emerald gave me one last look, filled with fear and sorrow, as though she no longer knew who she was.
Then suddenly she turned toward the doorway.
“I need Roman.”
The words hurt more than expected. It wasn't necessarily her departure that stung, but the fact that when she was breaking down, her first instinct was to seek comfort from him, not me.
“Emerald— ”
“He’ll know,” she said quickly, though it sounded more like desperation than certainty now. “Or he’ll know how to find out.”
Then she ran.
I heard her feet striking hardwood upstairs moments later.
Fast. Erratic. A bedroom door slammed hard enough to echo through the entire estate.
I stood motionless beside the dying fire while rain battered the windows.
Rage detonated through me. Pure violence.
I grabbed the nearest chair and hurled it across the room hard enough the wood exploded against the wall. I barely heard the impact.
Lucien. Even dead, he was still ruining people. I wanted to drag answers out of somebody’s throat with my bare hands. Malrik. Roman. Anyone still breathing who knew what the fuck Lucien had done. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t.
I dragged both hands through my hair before pacing once sharply across the room, trying and failing to suffocate the brutality crawling beneath my skin.
Then movement outside the front windows caught my attention. I froze instantly. Emerald.
She burst through the estate doors into the storm wearing nothing except the clothes she slept in, disappearing barefoot into the rain without hesitation.
My entire body locked.
“ Fuck ! ”
She was going after Roman. Alone. In this condition? Absolutely fucking not.
I snatched my gun off the table instinctively before stalking toward the entrance after her while thunder shook the sky hard enough to rattle the entire estate.