Mom, Dad Is With Another Pretty Woman!Chapter 1
My parents' love was the stuff of legend in Paris.
My father had three long scars running across his back—marks that he earned rescuing my mother from her own father.
The tallest, grandest building in the city was my father's wedding present to her.
The year I was born, the whole city lit the sky with fireworks all night—my father's gift to my mother.
People said I was the living proof of their love.
When I was three, a pretty woman moved in next door. She put my small hand on her rounded belly and smiled.
"I heard you've always been sickly," she said to me. "Your father finds you a nuisance, so he and I decided to try for another son."
"Your mother can't keep a man—she's useless. You'll have a new mother soon."
I didn't understand half of what she said, but I already had a mother. So when Mom came home I told her everything.
That night the villa next door went up in flames. The woman's sharp screams sliced through the sky. Mom came behind me and wrapped her arms around my neck, soft as always.
"Justin, do you like the present Mommy got you?" she asked.
——
"Mom—Dad! Dad is back!" I cried, pressed to the window, pointing at the man stepping out of the car below.
It had been six months since he'd come home.
But he didn't come inside. The moment he got out of the car, he ran straight into the fire.
I called and called, terrified, begging him to come back. He didn't answer. After a long while, he finally came out—carrying the neighbor woman from earlier. I breathed a long, relieved sigh.
Mom's face had gone hard.
At four in the morning he returned for real. I ran to meet him, eager to be lifted the way he always did. Instead, he shoved me toward his bodyguards and ordered them to seize me. Then he walked to Mom and grabbed her by the throat, hauling her up.
His voice was a cold thing I'd never heard from him before.
"You set the villa next door on fire, didn't you? The child Bella was carrying is gone—my blood! You're also a mother—how could you be so cruel?" he spat. "Do you know what the doctors said? If I'd arrived a moment later... Bella—she's just a child!"
Mom's face turned blue beneath his hand, but she still smiled, bitter and furious.