Chapter 113 (Disaster)

The world spun violently as Jeremy tried to steady himself, his head throbbing with a pain he couldn’t understand. A wound far deeper than any physical blow was forming in his heart—one that seemed impossible to heal.

He stood there, reeling, as the pieces of his past began to fall into place. Everything that had confused him over the years—the strange debts, the sudden behavior shifts from people like James, the oddity of Owen’s abrupt tutelage—was beginning to make a twisted kind of sense.

The man in front of him had piercing Prussian blue eyes. The woman’s hair, a bright, ethereal white, shimmered in the fading light of day. And as much as he hated to admit it, these were undeniable traits Jeremy saw in himself. Features that had always felt out of place but that he’d attributed to the father he had never known, the one his mother had described only in faint whispers of the past. But now, with every word they spoke, every look exchanged, Jeremy’s hope crumbled.