Suddenly, a blinding white light seemed to tear through Remy's dark, murky mind, as if lightning had struck him head-on. Shattered fragments of memory, like glass strewn across the ground, finally sliced through the haze that had long smothered his heart.
One by one, the handsome and beautiful faces of the Taylor family flickered through his thoughts.
He heard Jonah calling his name. He saw a young Alyssa sitting on a sunlit garden bench, cradling a fluffy white puppy in her arms, smiling sweetly as she called him Damien.
At last, the image settled on Mandy's gentle face.
"Damien..."
Remy's chest heaved violently. He braced himself with one hand to keep his balance while the other clutched his shirt tightly. Cold sweat traced a path down his sharp jawline.
Damien.
Damien...
His name was never Remy. He was Damien Taylor.
He did not dare look again at the blood-soaked scene on the screen. He feared that one more glance would rip his already fractured heart apart and make it collapse in on itself.
"Remy. Remy? Are you okay?"
Seeing how deathly pale he looked, one of his subordinates asked anxiously, "Are you having one of your usual headaches again? Ms. Gillis said you need to take your medication when this happens. We'll get it right away!"
"No. Don't." Remy closed his eyes for a moment. Mandy's gentle smile slowly faded from his mind, leaving behind a hollow emptiness and a pain that cut all the way to his bones. "I'm fine. I don't need any medication. Don't bring it to me."
His subordinates exchanged uneasy glances. "But Ms. Gillis said—"
"Do her words carry more weight than mine now?" Remy's gaze turned icy.
The men fell silent at once, shaking in fear.
Remy knew very well that something was terribly wrong with the medication Sheryl had prescribed under Justin's instructions all these years. Whenever his headaches flared up, the pills dulled the pain, but they also numbed his emotions and sealed away his memories.
Each time familiar yet unfamiliar silhouettes surfaced in his mind, the medication would interfere, erasing them one after another as if they had never been anything more than vivid hallucinations.
Worse still, the drug drained him of all interest in people and things alike. He became incapable of forming emotional ties, carrying out Justin's orders mechanically, like a mindless machine.
All this time, Justin had been pulling the strings, controlling his life as though he were nothing more than a puppet.
Remy no longer wanted to exist like a walking corpse.
Just then, his phone rang.
He exhaled heavily and pulled it out, his hands trembling. Sheryl's name glared at him from the screen.
Clenching his jaw, he forced his emotions down and answered the call, the muscles in his neck and shoulders tightening.
"What is it?" His gaze hardened into a flinty stare.
"I heard the people from the
Lovelace family have been taken
go
care of." Sheryl's tone was casual, as though she were speaking of a trivial errand "Mr. Justin wants you to the scene personally there's anyone stilkative, eliminate them yourself."
Remy's fists clenched. "I'm busy. I can't go."
"What could possibly be more important than this?" Sheryl let out a cold sneer. "Go.
You know very well what will happen if you disobey Mr. Justin."
Julien locked himself inside the research facility at Lovelace Group's pharmaceutical plant for an entire week obsessively analyzing the medication Justín had provided, determined to identify the unknown substances within it.
The test results were finally released that afternoon.
To his horror, he discovered an 80% match between the drugs Justin supplied to Winston and the
substances found in Jasper's blood.
sample. The discrepancies were
almost nonexistent.
In other words, the so-called life-saving medication from Justin was nothing but a narcotic in disguise.
Justin had already damaged Jasper's central nervous system, stripping him of his ability to feel. Now, he was attempting to do the same to Winston.
The motive was painfully clear-that monster wanted Alyssa to be completely alone.
That evening, Julien slipped the report into a brown envelope and hurried toward the underground parking lot.
Only then did he turn his phone back on.
Seconds later, it vibrated in his hand.
Jonah was calling, as if he had known exactly when Julien would resurface.