Sierra's words were like a curse, tying Georgia's heart into a knot.
She sat down slowly on the chair before Sierra, staring dead forward towards the person before her.
The mockery in Sierra's eyes was exactly as Emma had looked at her before.
She suddenly raised the question.
"Tell me, Sierra. Are you Emma Lane?"
At that, Sierra's sneer suddenly froze.
She probably hadn't expected her to ask that. Georgia slowly smiled.
"Look at that. All this time, we've been enemies. After twenty years, you've finally lost to me. Now you're my prisoner."
In the face of Georgia's certainty, Sierra seemingly gave up her struggle.
"That's right, I'm Emma. Surprise. I came back alive, and continued to get between you and Robert. You'll never be free of me. You really think you've won? At the moment you lose Robert Simpson, you'll still be the one who lost to me."
Sierra said that and brayed with deranged laughter, her hatred and contempt building further in her eyes.
She wanted to see Georgia broken; wanted to see her weep.
She knew she'd failed, but still, her twisted mind only wished for the woman before her to suffer more than she did.
"You haven't gotten between me and Robert. Even though he lost his memory, he still suspected you and trapped you. Look at you. All your plans. I heard from Robert how you sacrificed yourself and had him watch you humiliated by a whole gang. You gave up that much, but Robert didn't even fall in love with you. He still suspected you in the end. Do you still think you've won?
"Don't deny reality. Even if I can't spend the rest of my life with Robert, or if his body really as problems as you say, my heart has always been with him. You've never gotten a single one of the things you worked for. Not only that, but you burned all your bridges and ruined yourself."
Georgia finished, and Sierra couldn't hold back.
Face contorted, she looked at Georgia, then cackled.
"All those jabs. You're just afraid of knowing what's really up with Robert. Well, I'm going to tell you, and you'll never again know peace."
Sierra said that, and started speaking word for word. Georgia's face grew paler and paler.
"One year ago, on the island, when Laurence Knight compared you and Annie, I'd already connected with Jayson. No, even long before that, I'd been working with Laurence. But he only ever saw me as a tool, so I'd been looking for a way out. You know how Owen Lane died? He overstepped his bounds and wanted a cut from Laurence, so Laurence had him killed. I didn't mourn him, though. He didn't care for you, but he didn't show me much love as his daughter, either.
"I knew that Laurence wouldn't have any pity on me, and that I had to find someone else to work with. When Jayson reached out, I wondered when it'd be ripe for my revenge. That day, by kidnapping you and Annie, Laurence forced Robert to appear alone and save you by coming forward. His courage was admirable and his love towards you was true. Back then, everything was still in Laurence's grasp. Jayson and I only wanted to see the two of them tear each other to pieces and profit from the middle.
"Nobody expected Casey Allen to appear. That's right, your birth mother. I only heard from that day, and I don't know if you'd found each other yet. I heard she'd remained unconscious, so you probably never saw your mother. Do you know why you survived? Back then, in the chaos, I had someone take Robert and leave, then pointed a gun at you and got ready to shoot you. Casey, though, stood in front of you. The people who were going to save Robert were coming, too. So I shot Casey several times and left. It was too easy on you, letting you live... but whatever. Your birth mother probably won't ever wake up in this life again."
Sierra said that much, and Georgia was already clenching her fists, her nails digging into the crevices of her palms.
It hurt. It hurt so much she could hardly breathe.
It had hurt enough already when her mother told her how she'd saved her.
She felt even sorrier for her mother now that Sierra was describing it. Turning towards Sierra, she sneered.
"Too bad you'll be disappointed, then. A while ago, I went overseas, and my mother had already woken up. She's recovering well, and we've truly found each other. From now on, my mother will be at my side, and so will Annie. Our family will be together forever, and the ruin that you hope for will never happen!"
Those words had Sierra slightly taken aback, and she was naturally resentful.
She hadn't thought that Casey would survive.
"So what if your mother lives? How many more years can she be with you anyway?"
Sierra leered, and continued.
"You were saved by Jasper and Jason's people, then fell into a coma. As for me and Jayson, we brought Robert's body with us and left. Back then, just seeing Robert made me want to flay him alive and take revenge. Five years of being engaged only for him to kick me away. I hated his guts. So when Jayson suggested human experimentation in his lab, we brought him there as a live test subject.
"Know what the first plan was?"
Sierra smiled viciously at Georgia.
"I wanted to turn Robert into a drooling idiot who could only kneel and beg me for mercy every day. But it's not like I can ask those scientists to do anything I ask. As for Jayson, he had other plans. He wasn't broke back then, and the Ellis family was still in his grasp, so there were a lot of researchers there. Back then, the lab was at its peak. Every day, people screamed inside, and test subjects died. Some people even became freaks of nature.
"I was wondering how nice it'd be to have Robert turn into one of those freaks, but Jayson didn't think the same. He'd taken a shine to Robert's inheritance. It's worth hundreds of billions, after all. So Jayson and I thought of a plan to rob him of the inheritance. Of course, we hadn't started out with the plan we had now, with me pretending to be Robert's savior and killing him before inheriting the property.
"We'd first thought of damaging his nerves and hypnotizing him into believing he's in love with me, willingly turning the inheritance over to me and Jayson. We started that plan right from the beginning, but Robert's willpower was just too strong. Even with all the peak psychologists we found from across the world and master hypnotists, the plan didn't succeed. His mind was simply too strong. Even though we injected him with new types of poisons every day, even as he went through wave after wave of torture, he didn't submit.
"Those days lasted for about a month before Jayson and I gave up and decided to try a new method to ruin his psyche first and bypass his strong will. By coincidence, the lab had been conducting drug tests on nerve repair and regeneration. Robert's legs had been crippled in the beginning, so we decided to put him in as an experiment subject, at the same time seeing if we could cause just enough nerve damage to break his willpower. We didn't really want Robert to become a drooling fool. If that had been the case, we couldn't legally have him transfer the property to us.
"After all, there were people like Ivan, Jason and Jasper around him. They wouldn't have stood by and watched as we did that, so that plan wouldn't fly."
With Sierra having said that much, Georgia couldn't help but imagine the suffering Robert had been through in that month. Studying him by damaging his nerves, injecting all sorts of chemicals and poisons to break him. That wasn't torture a human being could withstand.
Unable to help it, Georgia walked up and slapped Sierra across the face.