My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 782

Chapter 782

My throat tightened, “So this was your care?” I gestured around the room, “This?”

“I wanted you to have every advantage.”

“Are you serious?” I looked at the broken phone in my hand, “You call this an advantage?”

“I wanted you to be better prepared than I was.”

I stared at him in disbelief, “You put me through torture.”

“I wanted you to overcome what held you back.”

“You made me believe I was defective.”

“You were defective,” he said, his voice hardening. “You are defective. And despite that, I still wanted you succeed.”

Something inside me snapped.

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The rage I’d been holding back for years surged through me, hot and violent, “You made me hate myself!”

His expression barely changed. He sighed, almost as though my anger was nothing more than an exhausting inconvenience, “I wanted you to become strong. I still don’t see the problem. You don’t become worthy of having an entire network under your command by being soft. You need a thick skin if you’re going to have the world at your feet.”

A bitter laugh slipped out of me. I shook my head, tears still clinging to my lashes, “You didn’t make me strong. I survived you. Mom made me strong.”

Dad studied me for a long moment before speaking, “I won’t apologize for trying to make sure my children never suffered the way I did. And I won’t apologize for trying to make both of you stronger, better people.”

I laughed again, “Don’t stand there and pretend you did all of this for us. This… all of this…. was never about me or Gio.”

His brow furrowed, “Of course it was. I have plans for you, Gianna. You can still choose to stay with me. Everything can still fall into place. You’ll learn what you need to learn. You’ll take your position. You’ll inherit what belongs to you. And you will lead.”

I stared at him, hardly believing the words coming out of his mouth, “You still think I want any of this?”

“You were born for it.”

“No,” I shook my head, stepping back from him, “You never saw me as your daughter. I was a subject. A number in one of those fucking files. A lab rat you could strap down whenever you needed another result. That’s what I was. And that’s what Gio was.”

Dad’s jaw tightened, “Don’t reduce what we were doing to that.”

“What else am I supposed to call it? You weren’t trying to save me. You weren’t trying to make my life better. You were testing me.”

His eyes narrowed, “We were trying to understand your condition.”

“Stop saying that,” my voice rose, “You were using me. You needed someone whose brain you could experiment on. Someone close enough to you that the results mattered to you.”

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He said nothing.

I swallowed the knot in my throat.

“You needed me because you thought whatever happened to my brain could eventually help you.”

His face hardened, “You were part of something larger.”

“That’s your excuse?” I shook my head slowly, “No, Dad. I wasn’t part of something larger. I was the thing you were willing to destroy to get what you wanted.”

My voice dropped to a whisper.

“I was your experiment.”

“Gianna-”

“You needed me to prove your theory.” I stepped closer, my eyes burning. “You needed to watch me suffer so you could convince yourself that one day you could fix yourself. You wanted to be healed.”

His jaw clenched.

“I wanted all of us to be healed,” he said, “You, me, and Gio. If the research had worked, all three of us could have benefited.”

I stared at him.

All three of us.

As if that made it better.

As if putting three names together could erase everything that had happened.

My eyes moved across the room.

Hundreds of faces stared back at me from pieces of paper. Children whose names I would probably never know. Children who had been brought into this room, strapped into those same chairs, placed beneath those same

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