Sylvester looked at me, the faintest trace of a smile still on his lips. "I'm not Millicent and John’s child at all. I'm just an orphan Silas adopted.”
He looked at me with eyes filled with mockery and even a little self-deprecation.
I was stunned when I heard this. My legs froze in place as if they had been cemented in place. I wanted to move, but I could not. "You’re…not?”
He shook his head. "I'm not. Millicent did give birth to a son and a daughter back then, but he died a long time ago. Silas kept this secret to avoid outsiders talking about how he had not only separated a couple but also killed his grandson. So, he went out somewhere and brought me back since I was the right age.
"No one could even begin to imagine how my life has been the past 20 years." There was despair in Sylvester’s eyes as he raised his head. "I’m just some child he brought along with him. As if Silas would treat me well. He would beat me as a way to vent when he was in a bad mood, and I’d have to grin and bear it and just take his attitude. I can’t confess who I really am to the outside world. He was afraid that I might and got people to monitor me every second of every minute. Anything I did, he would immediately know.”
A chill ran up the soles of my feet to my spine when I heard this.
Sylvester had unexpectedly gone through worse than I thought. Silas must have been cruel to him since he was not a Yard.
Sylvester reached his hand out to wipe his tears before turning back to look at me. "I decided to forget it since I could at least still own some shares of Yard Group, that my hard work for so many years was not in vain. But then I found out that he had been tracking your every move the entire time. He even got me to go look for you the moment he knew that you were in Whladorf City. Do you know what that meant? He meant to transfer the company’s shares to you, his true granddaughter!
"Fortunately… Fortunately, you didn’t want to come back. But that old man would not have it and insisted that you come back to inherit everything. I couldn’t let him have his way.”
I realized a bloodthirst shining in Sylvester's eyes and shivered.
"It doesn’t matter if I tell you all this since you don’t want to come back to the Yards and neither Silas is here anymore. Let tonight be the line drawn between you and the Yards. You’ll leave tomorrow morning and never come back here again unless it’s for partnerships in terms of business." Sylvester’s voice was light, and that made me feel a little scared.
I had not planned on getting involved in the Yards anymore to begin with. Sylvester's affairs had nothing to do with me, and I should count myself lucky he did not prod further into what I was doing.
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