REBORN My Second Life I Became The Villianess (Nyxara) novel Chapter 63

"Think about it, Nyxara," Dario continued, his voice calm, steady, and entirely too analytical for comfort. "Have you ever actually looked at your birth certificate? Have you ever questioned why you look nothing like Nysa, and nothing like the people who raised you?" he asked.

My mouth opened, but no words came out.

For years, I had just accepted the reality I was handed. Nysa had always looked like a carbon copy of Caroline, spoiled, sharp-featured, and obsessed with appearances. Meanwhile, I had always stood out. My features were softer, my eyes a rare, striking shade of violet that nobody else in the family possessed. Whenever I asked about it as a kid, Caroline would just wave a hand dismissively and say I took after some distant relative on their side of the family tree. I had never thought twice about it because I had bigger things to worry about, like surviving my mother's cold neglect and Nysa’s tantrum.

But hearing Dario say it out loud made a cold, heavy knot twist tightly in my stomach. "That's impossible," I muttered, though even to my own ears, my voice sounded shaky. "Carlton raised me. I grew up in that house."

"People can raise a child that isn't theirs," Pedro pointed out gently, leaning forward with a deeply sorrowful look in his eyes. "Especially if they had a reason to hide her. Emma... Emma disappeared over twenty years ago. She vanished without a trace, along with everything she owned. We searched for months, but we never found a single clue. Until today."

Elena gasped softly, bringing both hands up to cover her mouth as she stared between Pedro and me. Grandmother looked equally stunned, her sharp eyes darting over my face with a newfound intensity, as if she was trying to spot hidden secrets written in my skin.

"Are you saying," Vincenzo started slowly, his voice dropping to a cautious whisper, "that Nyxara might not be a Vexari at all?"

"I am saying," Pedro replied, his voice thick with emotion as he pointed a finger gently toward me, "that the timeline matches up and no two strangers share a face, a bone structure, and rare violet eyes by pure chance. It's biologically impossible."

I sat there frozen, the world around me seeming to tilt slightly on its axis. All my life, I had defined myself by my hatred for my family. I had spent years building Cipher Core from the ground up, plotting my revenge against Caroline and Nysa, believing down to my very bones that I was a Vexari who had simply been treated like an outsider.

If that was a lie... if I wasn't even their daughter... then who the hell was I?

"No," I said, shaking my head firmly as I pulled away from Dario's touch and stood up from the sofa. I needed to move, needed to put distance between myself and the suffocating weight of their stares.

"No, this is insane. You're talking about a ghost, Pedro. You're looking at a picture of a dead woman or a missing person and projecting it onto me just because we happen to have similar features." I said.

"Similar features?" Pedro repeated, letting out a dry, humorless chuckle. "Child, you are an exact clone. If I put a picture of Emma from twenty-two years ago next to you right now, nobody in this room would be able to tell which one is you." he said.

I crossed my arms tightly over my chest, glaring down at him. "People can look alike. It happens all the time. Doppelgängers exists." I countered.

"Not down to the exact placement of a birthmark," Pedro countered smoothly, his eyes locking onto my left wrist and I froze.

Slowly, without even thinking, my right hand instinctively moved to cover my left wrist, hiding the small, faint crescent-shaped birthmark sitting right above my pulse point. Pedro saw the movement. A sad, triumphant smile touched his lips.

"Emma had a birthmark in the exact same spot," Pedro whispered softly. "Right there on her left wrist. Shaped like a crescent moon."

The room went so quiet I could hear the faint hum of the air conditioning unit overhead. Every eye in the room shifted from Pedro's face down to my left wrist.

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