Frozen Vengeance: The Last Meal

chapter 3

 The Village Gate

The gate at Dasmariñas Village hadn't changed in nine years — same faded green paint, same bored security guard who waved Rafi's car through with barely a glance, same manicured hedges lining a street where every house pretended not to notice the others' business while knowing every detail of it.

Rafi parked outside his in-laws' house and sat there a moment, hands on the wheel, letting the memory of frostbitten walls and a serrated blade settle into something he could use instead of something that could break him.

The front door was unlocked, as always. He let himself in.

Everything sat exactly where memory placed it — Elena's ostentatious display of imported porcelain figurines crowding the entry table, the crooked runner on the staircase that Don Ramon refused to let anyone re-tack because he'd installed it himself, the cloying weight of Bel's perfume that had, over the years, completely erased whatever this house used to smell like before Rafi's money started renovating it room by room.

Don Ramon emerged from the sala already mid-lecture, phone still in hand. "There you are. Bel called, said you made a scene at the bank. Ano ba 'yan, Rafi — you need to call your wife and your brother-in-law right now and fix this."

Rafi walked past him toward the stairs.

"I'm talking to you." Don Ramon stepped directly into his path, chest puffed with the entitled authority of a man who'd never once been refused inside his own household. "You will sign that loan agreement again, or I swear I'll tell Bel to file for annulment. Do you understand what that will do to your reputation?"

In his previous life, that threat had always worked. Annulment. The word used to hollow him out completely — the fear of failing at the one thing he'd wanted more than anything, a real family, something no orphaned childhood or absent father had ever given him.

Now it sounded almost funny.

Rafi tried to step around him. Mistaking it for retreat, Don Ramon grabbed his shoulder hard enough to bruise and raised his other hand.

"You will listen to me when I'm speaking to you!"

The slap never landed. Rafi caught the older man's wrist mid-swing, twisted it down and back in one smooth motion, and drove Don Ramon's own weight forward until his chest hit the edge of the dining table, cheek pressed flat against polished narra wood.

Don Ramon yelped, more shock than pain.

"Touch me again," Rafi said quietly, right against his ear, "and I promise you, it won't end this gently."

Elena rushed in from the hallway carrying Miguel on her hip, took one look at the scene, and let out a shriek sharp enough to startle the boy into loud, confused crying.

Rafi released Don Ramon and turned toward the child.

Miguel. Dark hair, pale skin, watchful eyes that Rafi had spent eight years mistaking for shared blood, for evidence of some resemblance he desperately wanted to see. There had never been any real resemblance. He understood that now with the sick clarity of a man finally allowed to stop lying to himself.

"I need to check something," Rafi said gently, crouching to Miguel's level despite everything roaring underneath his calm exterior. "Open your mouth for me, buddy."

Elena pulled the boy closer, suspicious. "What are you trying to do?"

"Checking for a mouth ulcer," Rafi said, meeting her eyes. "Do you have cotton buds?"

She pointed, still wary, toward the kitchen cabinet, too rattled by the scene at the dining table to think through the request properly. The swab took thirty seconds. Miguel endured it with the bored patience of a child who found grown-up drama tedious, then immediately turned back to Elena to ask about merienda.

Rafi slipped the sealed swab into his jacket pocket and walked out without another word, Don Ramon still rubbing his wrist by the dining table, too stunned to manage a coherent threat.

The private lab off Shaw Boulevard offered same-day paternity results for a f*e steep enough to make most people flinch. Rafi 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, doing nothing but thinking.

At exactly seven that evening, his phone buzzed.

He opened the email standing right there in the waiting room, skipped straight to the summary line.

Based on the genetic markers analyzed, the probability that Rafael Villaroman is the biological father of Miguel Villaroman is 0.00%.

He read it once. Then again, slower, waiting for the grief to hit the way it had in every version of this moment he'd imagined over the years, back when he still suspected but never confirmed.

Instead, there was only a sharp, clean stillness, like something finally settling into its true shape after being forced into the wrong one for too long.

His phone rang before he'd even left the parking lot. Bel.

"Papa said you attacked him." No greeting, just fury sharpened to a point. "Ano ba, Rafi, have you completely lost it?"

"I have the DNA results," he said.

Silence, just long enough to confirm she understood exactly what he meant.

"Miguel isn't mine," Rafi continued, voice stripped of everything but fact. "He's Marco's. I know."

The silence stretched longer this time, heavy enough that he could hear her breathing shift on the other end.

"Rafi—" Her voice wavered, uncertain for the first time all day.

"Meet me at the Regional Trial Court tomorrow morning, eight sharp," he said. "Bring your lawyer. You're going to cooperate with the annulment. Fully. Without a fight."

"You can't just—"

"If you don't," he said, calm and precise, "I'll make sure the DNA report reaches your mother's parish group, your father's business partners, Marco's fiancée's family, every relative who ever looked down on me at a Christmas dinner. I'll make sure nobody in this city forgets what actually happened in this marriage."

The line went quiet.

When Bel spoke again, all the panic had drained out of her voice, replaced by something flat, calculating, and entirely without love.

"Fine."

She hung up first.