Page 54 of His Asset
I felt the last word slice through me.“We’renotmonsters.”
He raised a brow.“You’re not human either.”
The truth burned.I wanted to tear the smirk off his face, wanted to scream until my throat bled, but it wouldn’t change anything.I was both.I was neither.
Reuben tilted his head, voice almost casual.“Did you know I have spies in Adam’s facility?After he dragged you off, I had them dig all the information about you.Do you want to know what I found?”
Adam’s breathing turned ragged, his eyes flaring.The look in them was a mix of fear and guilt, then resignation.
I froze.“Say it.”
Reuben’s grin widened.“He knew about your parents.”
The world tilted.My pulse crashed in my ears, a roaring white noise that swallowed everything else.No.The word screamed in my head, silent and desperate.“I never had a mother or a father.I was a test-tube baby, born in a lab.Like the rest.”
So why did Adam’s eyes grow wild, his jaw clenching.Not in denial.Not even in surprise.But as if a long-buried truth had just been uncovered.
Reuben’s voice turned cruelly gleeful as he glanced at Adam.“Oh, she’s really going to hate you now.”His grin stretched wider when he refocused on me.“Your mother gave you that name—Bella—before she killed herself.She couldn’t stand living without the man she loved.Without the man whose own body was turning on him.”
I stared, breath catching like a blade in my chest.“You’re lying.”
But when I looked at Adam, I saw it—the truth, the profound guilt that had always lived in his eyes.The blood on his hands that would never wash off.
Parents?The word felt foreign, heavy.Impossible.I shook my head.Everything I thought I was no longer seemed real, my identity crushed into dust underfoot.My chest ached, my vision blurring at the edges.“Tell me it’s not true,” I whispered.
Adam met my gaze, and I saw it all—the remorse, the horror, the twisted thing that might have been love if it hadn’t been built on pain.
“You created others just like me, like my...parents,” I said.“You let the scientists hurt them, hurt me.You let them almost break me.”
He flinched like I’d struck him.I wished I had.
Then he dropped his head and slammed it back into Reuben’s face.The crack of bone echoed through the room like a gunshot.Reuben’s nose shattered under the impact.He stumbled back with a snarl, blood gushing between his fingers.Adam gasped for air, his eyes locking with mine again.
“Bella—”
“No.”My voice broke on the word.I didn’t even recognize the sound.
I stepped back once, twice.The walls felt too close, the air too thick.Every breath tasted of betrayal, burning my throat and making my head spin.My legs trembled, my fists clenched, as if I could hold myself together by sheer will.
“Please,” Adam rasped, staggering forward.“Your parents, they were separated, you were never supposed to—”
“Don’t.”I raised a trembling hand.“Don’t youdaresay I wasn’t supposed to happen.”
As if it wasn’t bad enough to have imagined all these years I was an experiment.To know that I was an accident, a byproduct of two people’s doomed love, it was intolerable.
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.I couldn’t think.My body trembled, my wings straining open along with an instinct that begged for escape.
I turned and ran.