*****Right now, the family of five had all forgotten their schemes.All their smug satisfaction, fear, and desperation had evaporated away as though they had never been there, replaced by something else entirely… reluctant fascination.And then, there was Grace, Susan, and Williams, their mouths opening wide enough to contain a thousand flies. They seemed dumbstruck, finding it difficult to believe what they had just heard.They were all completely engrossed in Xavier’s story.Xavier, however, didn’t look at any of them.If anything, his gaze remained lost somewhere between pain and memory, the atmosphere he carried, making even breathing feel sacrilegious.However, he only remained like that for a few seconds before exhaling again... this time softer and almost trembling, before finally, he turned his gaze back to Grace.His expression gentled instantly, and following this, the melancholic look of pain in his eyes vanished, replaced by quiet helplessness. “Did you know,” he

*****At first, when Xavier began to speak, sharing a piece of his own past, something within Grace had shifted.She had felt her chest tighten, something tugging painfully at her heart.It hadn’t been pity. It had been deeper than that… something closer to guilt, empathy, and awe, all tangled together.She had known, of course, that he had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for a crime he hadn’t committed.But hearing his experience and realizing that before that tragedy, he had already been broken down once… was something else entirely.While Grace hadn’t known him that long… she was very certain of one thing: Xavier was not the kind of man who bowed easily.He was proud… arrogant, even. So for someone like him to be given an option to kneel together with his parents, lick another person’s shoe, and crawl halfway through the city in apology? It had seemed almost unthinkable to her.So, Grace had been deeply affected that she had forgotten that this was supposed to be a

*****A thousand thoughts crashed through Grace’s mind, fragments of memory flashing in chaotic bursts… her mother’s face, her father’s trembling voice, and the anguish they must have felt when they realized that she had chosen to believe the old man over them.Each memory caused her chest to rise and fall rapidly, her breathing growing unsteady. Her eyes darted, shifting through anger, disbelief, grief, and finally... clarity.She shut her eyes and opened them, ready to finally speak and break the silence, when suddenly…“Ho… honey,” a trembling, cracked voice rasped, breaking through the suffocating silence.It was fragile and desperate… like the cry of someone standing on the brink of collapse.Grace, startled by the voice, flinched. Then instinctively, her head turned sharply toward the source.It came from her mother, who currently looked ready to fall apart.Her lips quivered, and her voice shook as she spoke again, “Please… please believe us,” she whispered, her tone al

*****“Silence!!!” the old man roared at last, his hand slamming down on the small table beside him, making the wood instantly splinter under the force, nearly collapsing.Then he shot to his feet, his aura exploding like a storm, his glare so intense that it felt as though he might leap at her and tear her apart.His eyes grew murderous cold, fuming so frantically that it appeared as though he would explode. “Have you forgotten who you stand before?” he hissed, his voice trembling with outrage. “How dare you speak to me with such a tone and look at me with those eyes?!”He jabbed a trembling finger toward Grace, thick veins throbbing down his wrist. “Have you grown so arrogant and so disrespectful that you can’t even recognize your patriarch anymore?”The sheer authority he released was so suffocating, causing the air itself to nearly bend beneath it.And at the sight of this, nearly everyone’s heart skipped a beat, their breath catching in their throats. Everyone apart from Xa

*****“You are not my damn child!”These words exploded like a grenade in the middle of the room.They didn’t just echo… they possessed the air, swallowing every sound and breath.It was the kind of declaration that stripped color from faces and warmth from the atmosphere, leaving only shock in its wake.Then came the silence.It wasn’t the ordinary kind… the kind that’s just quiet.No.What descended upon the room was a silence that devoured anything called sound, appearing heavy, suffocating, pressing down on the walls, and squeezing the very air from the room.It was as if sound itself had given up existing.If a fully blind man were to walk in right then, he would’ve sworn he had entered a tomb.Nothing moved, nothing breathed, and even time itself seemed to hesitate, unwilling to disturb what had just been unleashed.You could almost hear the sound of a pin dropping… or the exaggerated echo of an ant dragging itself across the floor.And the people inside?They were