Chapter 139
Damian's POV
Damian didn’t hear the rest of the sentence at first.
“I even went as far as sleeping with that scum… just to get pregnant.”
For a moment, the room stopped existing.
The study, the room, the books and every other thing in the space faded into something distant and unreal. All Damian could hear was the sound of blood rushing in his ears, loudly, drowning out everything else.
He stared at Vanessa.
She stood a few feet away from him, shoulders tense now, chin lifted in defiance she hadn’t intended to show. The words had slipped out too easily, spoken in the heat of accusation and wounded pride, and the second they left her mouth, something changed in her expression.
She knew, she knew she had said too much.
Damian blinked once, slowly. His face remained eerily calm, but beneath that calm, something had cracked inside him.
“What did you just say?” he asked.
His voice was low, almost quiet, and that made it worse.
Vanessa swallowed. Her lips parted as if to take the words back, to rearrange them into something less damning, something survivable. But the truth had already escaped. It hovered between them, ugly and impossible to ignore.
“I—” she started, then stopped.
Damian took a step closer.
The air between them tightened.
“You said,” he continued evenly, “that you slept with someone… to get pregnant.”
Vanessa’s fingers curled into the fabric of her dress. “Damian—”
“How,” he interrupted, his tone sharpening just slightly, “does that make the child mine?”
Vanessa froze.
Damian watched it happen in real time—the calculation, the panic, the frantic attempt to rebuild the mask that had slipped too off her face. He had seen that look before, in people who had just realized they were no longer in control of the narrative.
His heart pounded hard. “What else did you do?” he asked.
This time, there was no softness in his voice at all.
Vanessa shook her head quickly. “You’re twisting my words.”
“I’m repeating them,” Damian said. “Very carefully.”
She laughed, a brittle, forced sound that echoed in the quiet room. “You’re not listening to me. I did everything for you, everything. You wanted an heir. You wanted certainty. You wanted control. I gave you all of that.”
“By lying?” he asked.
Her eyes flashed. “By protecting you.”
Damian felt something inside him snap fully now. Years of discipline kept his body still, but his mind was racing, connecting dots he had refused to see before.
“You manipulated a medical process,” he said slowly. “You involved a lab technician. You interfered with evidence. And now you’re telling me you slept with someone else to ensure a pregnancy—”
“That’s not—”
“—while claiming the child was mine,” he finished.
Vanessa’s breathing was shallow now. She took a step back, then caught herself, straightening her spine again.
“You don’t understand what it’s like,” she said, voice trembling despite her effort. “To love someone who never looks at you the way he looks at someone else.”
Damian’s jaw tightened.
“So this was about Evelyn,” he said.
Vanessa’s lips pressed together.
That was enough to answer the question.
“You watched me question her,” Damian continued, every word precise. “You watched me doubt her integrity. You watched me send her away with a newborn child.”
Vanessa’s eyes burned. “She would have taken everything from me.”
“She took nothing,” he shot back. “You took.”
Her composure cracked then. “I did what I had to do!” she shouted. “For us!”
“There is no us,” Damian said flatly. “Vanessa, there is no us. And there will never be an us. I made it clear when you came close to me, I wasn't interested in any form of relationship. I wanted sex, and you wanted the fame, money, and everything that comes with my name. We agreed, you signed a contract, so there's no us."
The words landed with finality. Vanessa flinched as if struck by lightning.
Damian stepped away from her, turning toward the desk, bracing his hands against its surface just as he had earlier. The familiar gesture grounded him, but it didn’t stop the storm inside his head.
DNA results. Surveillance footage. A lab technician who hesitated. A nurse who avoided eye contact. Vanessa’s fear in the courtroom. And now this.
The picture was no longer fragmented, it was whole, the pieces had already come together. And it was damning.
“You didn’t just betray me,” Damian said without turning around. “You betrayed my family. My name.”
Vanessa’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I gave you a son.”
Damian laughed once, sharply. There was no humor in it.
“You gave me doubt,” he said. “You gave me a legal war. You gave me the possibility that I questioned the mother of my actual child because I trusted you.”
He turned back to face her.
“And now you expect me to what?” he asked. “Be grateful?”
Vanessa’s eyes filled with something wild—fear, rage, desperation all tangled together.
“I did it for love,” she said.
Damian’s expression hardened completely.
“No,” he replied. “You did it for possession, you did it for your selfish interest. I made it clear that you'll never carry my heir.”
She opened her mouth again, but he raised a hand, stopping her.
“Don’t,” he warned. “Every word you say now digs this hole deeper.”
The silence stretched again, thick and suffocating. Damian looked at her like a stranger. Then, quietly, dangerously calm, he asked the question that shattered what little control Vanessa had left.
“So tell me,” he said, eyes locking onto hers, “if you slept with someone else to get pregnant…”
His voice dropped.
“…how do you claim the child is mine?”
The room seemed to tilt.
Vanessa’s mouth opened, but no sound came out