Chapter 73 I Did It To Protect You

Chapter 73 I Did It To Protect You
Bella's POV

After asking him why, I waited and stood there, watching his face for any reaction at all.

The silence stretched between us, heavy and suffocating, and for a moment I thought he might actually refuse to answer entirely, and choose to sit there in silence forever.

He just stared back at me with an expression completely void of emotion, then gestured toward the empty seat again, patient as ever, like he had all the time in the world despite seeing how impatient I was at the moment.

I stormed over angrily and dropped down onto the couch, the impact rattling through my body. I looked at him, my patience already thinning by the second, my fingers curling into the fabric of the cushion beneath me to stop myself from doing anything rash.

He let out a long sigh after a few minutes.

"You shouldn't be so upset, Eva," he said quietly. "Everything I have ever done was to protect you."

“Heh” I scoffed loudly and the sound echoed in the quiet room.

"Protect me?" I asked, my voice dripping with disbelief. "Is that what you call it? Running a criminal organization behind everyone's backs, burning families alive, and letting an assassin stand guard at your front gate…That's protection?"

"Cut the nonsense about protecting me and get straight to the point," I snapped. “I don't want excuses…I want the truth."

He frowned slightly at my tone, but he didn't scold me for it. Instead, he turned his gaze toward the wall behind me, his expression softening into something distant and nostalgic, like he was looking through the wall at some memory only he could see.

"You know,you act a lot like your mother." he slowly said with a sad smile.

"Don't change the subject," I said, my voice rising sharply. "Stop beating around the bush and answer me directly. Why did you kill the Ricci family? Why are you the leader of THE FIRM? Why have you been attacking Ethan's organization? I want real answers, not stories about a woman I never even got to meet."

His expression turned cold instantly, and the warmth from a moment ago completely vanished.

"You should be grateful you're even alive," he said flatly and glared at me.

"You have no idea what I went through to save you when you were born, the risks I took bringing you to the Ricci family and keeping you hidden from anyone who might have wanted you dead before you even took your first breath. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't exist at all. None of this, whatever life you think you deserve to complain about, would even be possible!." He said coldly.

I frowned but said nothing, waiting for him to continue. I chose to swallow down the urge to argue back.

He let out a slow breath before speaking again.

"Twenty six years ago, I was nothing more than an ordinary level assassin," he said. "I was with your mother by then. We were young, and we were deeply in love. The kind of love that made everything else in the world feel smaller by comparison."

I stayed quiet, though something inside my chest tightened at the mention of her. A woman I had never known, and I never even saw a photograph of her. Her existence had always been a locked door that nobody dared to open.

"As you already know, her name was Elena," he continued. "She was my first love and we met at university. She wasn't on good terms with her family and she ran away from home not long after we started seeing each other. We lived together after that and did everything together. For a while, life felt simple and I was contented."

I studied his face carefully as he spoke, searching for any hint of a lie, but there was none. He looked like a man genuinely lost in memory, his usual calm composure momentarily replaced by a look of heartache.

"I was eventually recruited by a professor into THE FIRM," he said. "At first, the training was brutal and it was harder than anything I had ever experienced in my life. Many nights I questioned whether I could even survive it. But the pay was substantial, more money than I had ever seen in my life, so I stayed. And even if I had wanted to leave later on, there was only one way out by then."

"Death," I said quietly, because that's how the dark life of the underground works.

He nodded once, his eyes distant, like he was reliving something he had buried for a very long time, something he never expected to have to speak about out loud again.

"One day, I returned from a mission injured," he continued. "Elena took care of me while I recovered, staying by my bedside for days without much rest. While I was unconscious, she stumbled across my assassin supplies. My identification cards, passports under different names and weapons I had no reasonable explanation for, hidden in places she never expected to find them."

My stomach twisted slightly, imagining the shock she must have felt, discovering the truth about the man she loved in the worst possible way, alone and afraid with nobody to explain it to her.

"She panicked and when I woke up, she begged me to leave the organization. But by then, I was already too deep into it. I wasn't some rookie anymore…I had built a reputation, connections, obligations that stretched further than she could ever understand. Leaving wasn't as simple as she believed it could be."

He paused, reaching for the glass of water on the table beside him, taking a slow sip before setting it back down carefully, almost like he needed the small pause to steady himself before continuing further.

I didn't say anything. I simply waited, my whole body tense with anticipation for whatever came next, my mind already racing ahead to conclusions I wasn't ready to accept

He took a deep breath before continuing.

"Elena kept insisting over and over again that I leave," he said. "At that time, she was already pregnant with you. I tried everything to convince her that nothing would happen to either of us. I promised her I could keep us both safe, no matter what it took, no matter what I had to do to make sure of it."

"But she didn't believe you," I said, my voice calmer now, some part of me already grieving a woman I had never known.

"She refused to listen to reason," he admitted. " And she had discovered something else by then too. That the Ricci family was connected to the underground black markets. That was exactly why she ran away from them in the first place. She didn't want anything to do with that world, and suddenly she found herself tangled up in something just as dangerous through me instead.”

I could see the guilt flickering briefly across his face before he masked it again, smoothing his expression back into something more composed.

"I couldn't change her mind," he continued. "And no matter what I said, she wouldn't back down. Eventually, she started trying to disrupt my missions herself. Small things at first, then she began warning targets before I could reach them and tampering with equipment I needed to complete a job properly. I was terrified the organization would start noticing the pattern."

His voice trailed off slightly, like the memory itself was difficult to push through, his hands tightening briefly around the glass still resting in his palm.

"I was scared that the organization would notice," he repeated, more to himself than to me, "and once they noticed, there would be consequences. Not just for me, for her and for you, that was growing inside her. Everything I had built, everything I had sacrificed to survive in that world, would mean nothing if they decided she was a liability."

My heart pounded harder in my chest, dread building with every word he spoke.

I already knew where this story was heading. I could feel it building in my chest, the horrible realization creeping closer with every sentence, every carefully chosen word he said.

"What happened next?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, though some part of me already dreaded the answer.

He hesitated, his eyes finally meeting mine directly for the first time since he started talking, something unreadable passing behind them.

I couldn't wait for him to dance around it any longer. The pieces were already falling into place in my mind, forming a picture I desperately didn't want to see clearly, one I had been refusing to let myself fully imagine since the moment he mentioned her name.

"So you killed her?" I interrupted him sharply, my anger boiling over before he could even say anything else.

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Author here “_”

Thank you for reading. I just resumed updating after some months due to health issues, so thank you for your support.

Bella and Eva are the same person, just so you wouldn't be confused. I noticed I have been switching the names when indicating POV.

Please your comments would be well appreciated as it can be very encouraging for me. Thank you for reading ^_^