Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 792

Chapter 792: Vanishing Traces

Jack’s voice cracked open, venom seeping through the performance of grief like acid eating cloth. "You son of a whore. You stole everything. Every scrap of who I was, every future I might’ve had. You turned it all to ash."

The mask shattered completely.

"And you, Mom—Patricia—" A laugh tore out of him, jagged and corrosive. "I’ll never forgive you either. Not that you care. Not that it would even register. Turns out I’m not really your son anyway. Just learned that little bombshell. Suddenly Dad’s obsession with keeping you at arm’s length makes perfect sense. Toxic stepmother, right?"

The reveal detonated in the living room. Every gaze snapped to Patricia.

I already knew. She’d told me weeks earlier—long before I began dismantling Jack’s life piece by piece, before I dragged every buried crime into daylight, before I reduced his future to cinders. That single truth had let me hunt him without remorse, without second-guessing the collateral pain to a woman I actually cared about.

Jack Morrison was never Patricia’s biological child.

She couldn’t bear children. Never could. When Richard Morrison married her, he’d known from the start. They’d chased every treatment money could buy—years of invasive, humiliating, useless procedures. Nothing worked.

Then came the affair. Short. Disposable to Richard. The other woman became pregnant.

She didn’t want the baby.

Richard and Patricia did.

So they struck a bargain that quietly gutted Patricia for decades: she would raise Jack as her own, play the flawless mother, bury the secret forever. In return, Richard transferred fen percent of Morrison Construction shares—ten for her agreement, the other five (of the fifteen) more for her were her’s.

She said yes. Because she desperately wanted a child. Because she believed she could love someone else’s son as fiercely as her own. Because she convinced herself the lie could become truth.

Richard never allowed it.

He raised Jack alone—controlled every choice, instilled every value, taught the boy that women were objects and power was the only language worth speaking. Patricia became set dressing: the signature on school forms, the face at recitals, the woman with no real voice in who Jack would become.

By the time Jack turned ten, his father had already claimed him completely. Patricia had lost him to the same poison that had poisoned Richard first.

During the divorce, those shares meant nothing anymore. The marriage was dead. The pretense was useless. The boy who’d never truly been hers was already a grown man carved in his father’s image—too far gone to redeem.

When I offered to buy the shares outright when I refused to take them for free, she signed them away in a single afternoon. Fifteen percent of a multi-million-dollar company traded for cash and release from a lie that had eaten her alive for thirty years.

That was why she never once tried to stop me when I went after Jack. He had never been hers to save. Protecting him would have meant torching her own sanity for a bond that had never existed.

Now Patricia explained it to the others—voice steady, almost dispassionate, thirty years of buried grief distilled into plain sentences.

"Because he was never mine," she said at the end. "I tried to care for him. Tried to love him. But he was Richard’s creation. Richard’s experiment. Richard’s failure."

She rose, crossed to the window, stared out across the dark sweep of the estate.

"If Jack needs to hate me for it, let him. I’m finished carrying guilt for a choice I never got to make."

The room let the words settle—slow, heavy, staining everything they touched.

Then ARIA’s voice cut through my head, edged with something I’d never heard from her before.

"Master. This video is compromised. Severely."

"Define compromised," I subvocalized, face blank while Patricia still spoke.

"Speech cadence shows emotional strain, yet multiple indicators of rehearsal—scripted delivery. Oculomotor patterns consistent with reading prepared text or reciting memorized lines. Micro-expressions misaligned with stated affect. Vocal stress markers suggest coercion or heavy external incentive." A fractional pause.

"Eighty-three percent probability the recording was made under duress or as part of an explicit deal."

My pulse turned to ice. "Someone forced him?"

"Or he consented in exchange for consideration. Data insufficient to distinguish."

"Current location?"

"Unknown. And Master—this is the critical escalation."

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