Chapter 210: And The Crow Failed To Return The Favor

LOUISE’S POV

My phone rests facedown on the wooden nightstand beside the lamp. I wonder why they didn’t take this away from me too... Adrien’s arrogance truly has no bounds.

Its screen has been black for hours, but I can still remember the vibration from that day, the brief interruption that seemed to leave something behind even after the call ended.

I remember the exact moment Yaya called me.

I didn’t need him to spell anything out. The moment the unknown number flashed across the screen, I already knew what he wanted.

I understood how things were meant to proceed, and I knew what that call meant for me.

He spoke in that low, steady tone of his, his words clipped and brief. The details didn’t matter. I didn’t need an explanation of his motives or a breakdown of how the pieces were falling into place.

I simply knew.

What matters is what shifted inside me the second the line went dead.

From that moment, I began to accept what lay ahead. It wasn’t a dramatic surrender. I didn’t burst into tears, feel a sudden urge to confess my sins, or decide to become a better person.

I felt no regret for the things I had done, and I wasn’t looking for anyone’s forgiveness.

Instead, that brief phone call became a quiet turning point, a cold key turning in an old lock. It led me to look back at my life, at the few people who had mattered to me and the choices that had brought me here.

My thoughts move toward Matteo.

He was the gentle man who cared for me when I was small, the only person who looked at me without making me feel as though I owed him something in return.

I remember his soft voice, the worn leather briefcase he carried, and the strawberry candies he used to hide in my coat pockets so my mother wouldn’t find them.

I remember how much I wanted him to be my real father. How I used to pray to the God he spoke about so often, hoping He would somehow make it possible for Matteo to take me away from Alice.

I was a child. I believed that if I wanted something badly enough, if I prayed hard enough, someone would eventually hear me.

Someone would come and take me somewhere safe.

But no one came.

Instead, I watched Alice take everything Matteo had to offer and leave him with nothing.

Eleven agonizing years in a hospital bed. Eleven years of breathing through plastic tubes while the world carried on without him.

Eleven years in which the man who had shown me kindness was reduced to a name on a hospital record, while the woman who ruined his life drank expensive wine in a mansion.

I still remember sitting in Room 408, holding that tiny glass vial of murky liquid and staring at the empty bed where he had spent so many years.

I remember how cold the room felt.

I remember thinking that being kind in this world was nothing more than an invitation to be used, bled dry, and discarded.

Matteo had been kind. He had been gentle, faithful, and loving. He had given what little he possessed to a woman who saw his affection as an opportunity, and he had paid for it with the years of his life.

I don’t know what happens to good people after they die. I don’t know whether the God Matteo believed in has a place for men like him, somewhere beyond the reach of people like my mother.

I only know that he deserved better.

That is the one truth I have never managed to make myself doubt.

My thoughts drift away from him, moving toward a place I would rather leave untouched.

Adrien.

The name brings an unpleasant tightness to my jaw. I shift my attention to the lamp, to the faint reflection of its shade against the polished wood, as though looking at something else might make the thought disappear.

It doesn’t.

He was the only person outside Matteo with whom I ever shared anything that could have been mistaken for a genuine connection.

That doesn’t mean we were close. It doesn’t mean we understood each other, and it certainly doesn’t erase the years we spent finding new ways to hurt one another.

Still, there are memories that refuse to stay buried, no matter how much I would prefer to leave them there.

I remember the boy who once asked me what I wanted from life.

We were sixteen, sitting in the dusty glasshouse at the back of the Dubois estate. The place was neglected, with half-dead ferns crowding the corners and weeds pushing through the soil.

Adrien sat on an overturned wooden crate, pulling tiny weeds from around the plants with the patience of someone who had nowhere better to be. no.

I know I hated how calm he looked. How peaceful...

He looked nothing like the boy who walked through the mansion’s corridors with his chin raised and contempt resting comfortably on his face.

For once, he wasn’t trying to lowering his head because he felt small. He wasn’t performing for his father or my mother, trying to prove that he could be as cold and unpleasant as the man who had raised him.

He was simply sitting there, occupied with a useless little task in a forgotten corner of the estate.

I remember asking him what he wanted from life.

Perhaps I expected him to give me the sort of answer that would suit a Dubois heir. Wealth. Power. A position no one could challenge. Something expensive enough to make everyone else feel insignificant.

Instead, he told me he wanted a quiet house by the water.

A simple place where he could wake up in the morning without having to deal with people making demands of him. Somewhere peaceful, where nothing much happened.

He said it without embarrassment.

I remember looking at him, waiting for the joke or the arrogant remark that would turn his answer into something I could mock.

It never came.

For a little while, the glasshouse seemed separate from the rest of the estate. We weren’t Henri’s son and Alice’s daughter. We weren’t two children caught in a family arrangement neither of us had chosen.

We were just two people sitting in a neglected room, talking about what life might look like if we could make our own decisions.