A Housekeeper's Daughter（Nepheia's POV）

That gesture — that instinctive, possessive act of pulling Mina completely under his protection — cut deeper than any rebuttal could have, and snapped me back to my senses more sharply than any slap.

I looked at him. At this man I had called brother for over a decade. On one side of his handsome face, the red imprint of our mother's hand still burned. On the other — blind, furious devotion to a liar.

How pathetic.

"Jonson..." Mina trembled in his arms like a leaf battered by wind, her sobs wretched and plaintive. "Please, apologize to the Countess on my behalf — it's all my fault. I never should have reached for things that don't belong to me. I'm the reason you and Nepheia have grown so distant. Please, don't do this for my sake..."

And then, as if the words weren't enough, she pulled free from behind him and dropped to her knees before Annette, her white skirts fanning across the polished floor like a broken lily.

"Countess, please don't blame Young Master Jonson." She tilted her tear-streaked face upward, every word saturated with manufactured sincerity. "He is only kind-hearted. He pitied me. If someone must be punished, let it be me. I was greedy. I presumed to attach myself to the Fatasleigh name. I will accept any consequence — only please, do not take your anger out on him."

A masterclass in tactical retreat. What a perfect little martyr.

Under ordinary circumstances, that performance might have fooled half the room. But Annette's fury had already been ignited — and Mina's flood of tears didn't douse it. It fed it.

Crack.

The sound rang out sharper than the two blows that had landed on Jonson's face — harder, and utterly without mercy.

Annette stood over her, contempt in her eyes so dense it had almost taken physical form. "You dare invoke the Fatasleigh name? A nanny's daughter, thinking a few tears are enough to muddy bloodlines and crawl into her master's bed. Your ambitions are even filthier than your birth."

The slap left Mina reeling. She pressed her hand to her rapidly swelling cheek, staring up at Annette with an expression of stunned disbelief, tears spilling in an unbroken stream.

"Mother!" The word tore from Jonson's throat. His eyes had gone red. He crossed the distance in a single stride and hauled Mina behind him again, turning on his own mother with barely contained rage. "How could you strike her? What has she done wrong?"

Every guest in the room had gone utterly still. What had begun as a dinner party had devolved into a Fatasleigh family tribunal — and it was far too riveting to look away from.

"What has she done wrong?"

I let out a cold laugh. My wheelchair rolled forward until I stopped directly in front of Jonson, my gaze level with his fury-reddened eyes.

"Jonson. You say I've been cruel to her. Then say it now — in front of everyone. Tell me exactly how I've wronged her."

His breath caught. His mouth opened. And then nothing came out.

Because what could he say?

Since my return, I had done nothing more than occupy my own room and use my own belongings. Every grievance he'd ever heard had come from one source: Mina, weeping before him, again and again.

"You..." He struggled, jaw working, until he finally forced something out. "Ever since you came back, she hasn't stopped crying!"

A wave of poorly stifled laughter rippled through the crowd.

It was such a feeble excuse it barely qualified as one.

"So," I said slowly, as though genuinely considering the logic, "if she cries, it's my fault." I nodded, then lifted my gaze to sweep the entire room — my voice unhurried, but carrying into every corner. "Let the record show: in this household, a single tear from Mina is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing on my part."

I turned back to her pale face, and my voice dropped to something colder.

"Mina. Those tears of yours are the most effective weapon I've ever seen. They've convinced my own brother to abandon every ounce of his judgment. They drove my fiancé away from me. They allowed a nanny's daughter to steal everything that was mine — and feel perfectly entitled to it."

"No — that's not—" Mina shook her head frantically, reaching for words.

I didn't let her find them.

"Not what?" I pressed, relentless. "Not true that you told Jonson I was difficult and made your life miserable? Not true that you cried to Koujirius about how I couldn't tolerate you — until he turned cold toward me? Not true that you orchestrated all of this, had me abandoned on a deserted island, so that you could stand here tonight wearing the Fatasleigh name like it was always yours?"

With every sentence, another shade of color drained from her face. By the end, she was shaking too hard to form a complete sentence — only a broken, repeated murmur: "I didn't... I really didn't..."

"Enough!" Jonson's voice cracked like a whip. "Nepheia, stop. Mina is kind — she would never—"

"Kind?" I cut him off, and a laugh escaped me — a sound stripped of everything except ice. "Then let me show everyone exactly how kind she is."

I let every expression fall away from my face.

The banquet hall went so silent that the sound of breathing disappeared entirely.

I knew Seriomel was watching. Annette was waiting. Every person in that room was waiting — for me to lay down the final card, the one that would nail Mina to her shame once and for all.

"Because she is not a Fatasleigh ward." My voice was quiet and perfectly steady, but it carried the weight of something immovable. "She does not carry the Fatasleigh name. Her surname is Garnier."

"She is the biological daughter of the old nanny — Anne Garnier — who served in this household twenty years ago."

The words detonated.

A thunderclap in a gilded room.

The collective silence shattered into pure, stunned shock. Jaws went slack. Eyes went wide.

A nanny's daughter?

A false heiress?

This was not merely a scandal. This was an act of open contempt for the very bloodline hierarchies that the entire aristocracy was built upon — a fraud perpetrated against every person in that room.

"The old nanny your father mourned for twenty years — the woman everyone believed had died in an accident — never died at all." I watched the blood drain from Mina's face as I stripped back the rot that had been festering for two decades. "She faked her death. She built herself a new identity. And the first thing she did with it was kidnap my real guardian, steal me from a family that loved me, and replace me with her own daughter."

"She stole eighteen years of my life."

My voice rose — raw, and scorching with the kind of grief that doesn't perform itself. Every word landed like a brand, searing into Jonson, into Koujirius, into every person present.

The room erupted.

The looks aimed at Mina no longer held contempt. They held something far worse: horror, and revulsion — the kind reserved not for a scheming woman but for a thief. The lowest, most contemptible kind of fraud.

Mina crumpled. All the strength went out of her at once, and she sank to the floor, white as paper, lips trembling, unable to produce a single word. Those eyes that had cried so many "heartfelt" tears now held nothing but pure, annihilating terror.

Jonson stood as though he'd taken a physical blow. His body swayed. Slowly — with the halting disbelief of a man whose foundations had just been pulled from beneath him — his gaze shifted from my face to the girl he had shielded behind him.

The girl he had grown up beside. The girl for whom he had wounded his own sister without hesitation.

The girl he had always believed to be gentle. Pure. wrongfully burdened.

A fraud.

A thief who had stolen his sister's entire life.

Shock and fury warred across his face — and then both gave way to something deeper and more devastating: the humiliation of a man who had been played for a fool by someone he trusted completely.

Mina felt the shift in his gaze. On instinct, she reached out for his leg — those fingers that he had always taken so gently, wiping her tears away without a second thought.

"Jonson..."

Her hand never reached him.

He recoiled as though she'd grabbed at something rotten, stepping sharply back, his bloodshot eyes locked onto her with an expression she had never seen on his face before.

When he spoke, his voice was warped beyond recognition by the force of what was inside him.

"Is it true?"