Frozen Retribution

Chapter3

CHAPTER 3 — A DNA Test at the Dinner Table

The front door slammed hard enough to leave a fresh dent in the plaster.

Everything in the Kusuma house was exactly as Bagas remembered it — the plastic orchids Ratna arranged on the entry table every Sunday, the crooked stair runner Marwan had installed himself and refused to let anyone fix, the cloying sweetness of Lara's perfume that had, year by year, swallowed whatever his own parents' house used to smell like before it became this one.

Marwan stormed out of the living room wearing the grave, self-important scowl he reserved for lectures disguised as fatherly wisdom. "There you are. Lara called — told me about the scene you made at the bank. What the hell were you thinking? Call her right now and apologize. Call Handoko too."

Bagas walked past him toward the stairs.

"I'm talking to you." Marwan planted himself in the doorway. "You will sign that mortgage agreement again — or I'll have Lara file for divorce, do you understand me?"

In his old life, that threat had worked every single time. Divorce. The word used to stop him cold, send him retreating into apologies, into whatever it took to keep the peace, because he'd believed a marriage worth having was a marriage worth bleeding for.

Now it was almost funny.

Bagas didn't stop walking. Mistaking silence for surrender, Marwan grabbed his shoulder and raised his hand.

"How dare you ignore me when I'm speaking!"

That was enough.

Bagas caught the wrist before the slap landed, twisted it down in one smooth motion, stepped behind the older man, and drove his arm up between his shoulder blades. Marwan's chest hit the dining table before his cheek followed, pinned flat against the polished wood.

He let out a strangled yelp of pain and pure disbelief.

"Touch me again," Bagas said quietly, "and it won't end this gently."

Ratna rounded the hallway corner with Kenan on her hip and screamed at the sight — sharp, hysterical, loud enough that the boy startled awake into tears.

Bagas released Marwan and crossed to her, his eyes on the crying child.

This was exactly who he'd come here for.

Once, this boy had been the entire center of his world — the reason he'd worked double shifts, skipped his own birthday dinners, told himself every sacrifice was worth it. Now, looking at him, that love had curdled into something he didn't have a name for.

Kenan had Lara's dark hair, her pale skin, that same watchful, calculating look Bagas had once mistaken for cleverness. He'd never questioned the lack of resemblance — told himself genetics were unpredictable, that love didn't need a mirror. Eight years wearing another man's shame without knowing it.

There is nothing more dangerous than an honest man who has finally run out of things to lose.

"I need to check something," Bagas said gently, crouching to Kenan's height. "Open your mouth for me."

Ratna pulled the boy closer, alarmed. "What are you doing?"

"Checking for a mouth ulcer, Bu Ratna." He looked up at her, perfectly calm. "Do you have cotton swabs?"

Still shaking from what she'd just witnessed at the table, she pointed wordlessly toward the kitchen cabinet.

The swab took thirty seconds. Kenan submitted to it with the bored tolerance of a child who found every adult around him tedious, then turned straight back to Ratna to whine about dinner.

Bagas sealed the swab in a plastic bag, slid it into his coat pocket, and walked out without another word.

The private lab on Jalan Melati offered same-day results for a f*e steep enough to make most people flinch. Bagas paid without blinking, gave his own cheek swab in the parking lot, and spent the rest of the afternoon in a plastic waiting-room chair with a paper cup of water going warm in his hand.

At seven that evening, his phone buzzed. One email. One attachment.

He skipped straight to the conclusion.

Based on the genetic markers examined, the probability that Bagas Wirawan is the biological father of the tested child is 0.00%.

He read it once. Then again.

There was no explosion of grief, no fist through the dashboard. Just a sharp, terrible clarity settling over him like frost. He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and felt the last piece of the man he used to be quietly finish dying.

His phone rang. Lara.

He answered.

"Papa said you attacked him!" No greeting. "What is wrong with you today, this is completely —"

"I have the results."

Silence, sudden and total.

"Kenan isn't mine," Bagas said, voice stripped bare of everything. "I know he's Kurnia's."

The silence stretched so long he thought the call had dropped.

"Bagas..." Her voice came back small. Frightened, for the first time in nine years.

"It doesn't matter anymore," he continued, calm as still water. "You'll meet me at the civil registry office tomorrow morning, eight sharp. You will cooperate with the divorce. Completely. Without a single objection."

"Bagas, please, you're not thinking straight —"

"If you don't," he cut in smoothly, "the DNA report goes to your mother's arisan group. Your father's golf friends. Handoko's business contacts. Every relative, every friend, everyone who has ever looked at your family and thought what a perfect life."

He let that sit.

"I'll make sure no one ever looks at any of you again without remembering exactly what you did to me."

Nothing but her breathing on the other end. Then her voice changed — the panic gone, replaced by something hard, practical, and cold as the world he'd just escaped.

"Fine."

The line went dead. And somewhere across the city, a phone she hadn't hung up fast enough carried one more sound before it cut off completely: Kurnia's voice, low and urgent, asking what did he say, what does he know — and Lara's answer, swallowed by static, leaving Bagas standing alone in the dark with a question he hadn't asked yet already burning a hole through his certainty.

How much does Kurnia already know is coming?