' Dear Alex,
By the time this letter reaches you I assume I would no longer be here....
I wish I had a better excuse to give to you for everything. I'm a pathetic father who was not there for his own son when he needed him the most, I have no right to appear in your life when finally you are being happy.
I hope one day you will truly forgive me for not being a good father to you. '
"It took him hours to write that" Akio almost startled Alex whose eyes were fixated on a piece of paper deeply enough to not notice him being there.
He put a cup of tea next to Alex, adding to a few more cups that were already there along with some plates of untouched food.
" He stared at the paper for hours before he finally decided to write something, afterwards, he wrote this, crumpled up the page pretty much twice.. "Akio continued resting his back against the wall with his arms folded.
" And then ?" Alex who wouldn't even talk to Zhuang or even Adrian as a matter of fact since the last few hours finally responded.
"He decided not to send, he said maybe it's better that he left without saying anything to you" Akio responded.
Alex didn't react much, even his tears had gone dry. His nose was pretty much blocked causing his voice to sound much more nasal than it usually was.
He didn't really have to ask Akio the rest. He could pretty much imagine the thought process of Joshua Hughes on his own.
As a matter of fact, he had almost completely recovered from the amnesia caused by the accident. The pictures of his parents and siblings were much more clearer to him now.
His amnesia was most probably induced by trauma rather than his physical injuries. Some of it was replaced by Kirihara Liliya later in his life.
He would see the faces of his family in frames and albums sometimes but he could never remember his bonding or connection with them. They were just a bunch of people on a bunch of pictures for him.
Maybe at that time, he needed to forget in order to live. He didn't think about it nor tried to uncover it. This was a way he had protected his fragile mind back then.
Unfortunately, he couldn't escape far from his past either way. It had caught up to him.
Now the people in those pictures were suddenly alive in his mind and heart. They had feelings and connections to him. He had to mourn for his family, yet again.
"Did he know..." Alex whispered and without having to know what he was going to say, Akio already understood.
"He didn't know you were alive" Akio replied to him.
It almost made Akio wonder too. He wondered if Joshua Hughes had known Alex was alive, would he have given up his revenge? Could Alex have become his anchor just like Natsuro was his own?
The compromises a parent would make for their child are beyond comprehension...
Joshua Hughes would have thought he had nothing to lose anymore and so he sought vengeance recklessly. Nicholas Strahovski probably knew that keeping Joshua and Alex apart was the only way to keep Joshua on the path of vengeance. He had no sympathy whatsoever...
But by the time Joshua had found out about Alex's existence, it was already too late. He was not going to survive this anyways but maybe some part of him wanted to live again after knowing. Maybe he had some moments of regret right before the fire engulfed his body... That he should've atleast seen his son one last time...
The pain of losing a loving parent is always mortifying...
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"Why don't you go inside?"
Mari walked up behind Ian freaking him out as usual, he pretty much jumped over holding his chest.
"Stop doing that! I'm scared of small things suddenly appearing behind me" Ian said catching a breath and a visible line of annoyance appeared on Mari's forehead.
"It's just that I don't know how to console him..."
While Mari was pretty much ready to bury Ian half into the ground so that they can be the same height, she chose to refrain from choosing violence today.
"If you're not gonna go in, then let's go back" Mari watched Akio move about Alex's house and close up windows since it was already getting dark.
"This has been an awfully weird day for brother, at one side is the death of his father and on the other side is the birth of his bestfriend's child... Brother will have alot of difficulty with this day in the future.. " Ian went on over his sympathies with Alex.
" Have they confirmed the death of Ivan Strauss? " Mari asked Ian out of the blue, who now shifted from a pitiful expression to a stressed one.
"They haven't.." Ian replied.
"Brother Kei has already made a court case. We had a lawyer on the inside, an old friend of brother kei, he's called Max Jones" Mari told him.
"Max Jones???! Isn't he that lawyer that dad- I mean Ivan Strauss decided to hire?" Ian was dumbfounded.
"Do you know that brother Kei's mom isn't my mom? Basically Brother's mom is a lawyer too and she lives abroad and lawyer Max Jones is actually her husband.. that's not a public information though.. " Mari explained, causing Ian to be confused even more than before.
" What could Max Jones do that Nicholas Strahovski couldn't? " Ian asked, it didn't make sense, Nicolas had spent five years in simply infiltrating the Strauss family. How could Max Jones make it within a week?
"He didn't, he simply built up on whatever Nicolas Strahovski had already worked upon and the rest was handled by brother Kei" Mari replied.
"Someone like Nicholas shared his information?" Ian was somewhat surprised, Nicolas trusted no one, atleast not after what happened to her sister. She had also trusted the wrong person and gotten herself exposed.
"Nicholas didn't, Joshua Hughes did, he came to visit Aoi a few days before all of this, he entrusted everything they'd found out so far to Aoi" Mari replied.
For a moment Ian was somewhat silent.
"Joshua Hughes decided to trust Himari Aoi afterall..." Ian mumbled.
Though, he thought about it critically too. Nicolas and Joshua had to resort to vigilante tactics in order to destroy some of Ivan Strauss's business. However, someone like Himari Aoi didn't have to worry about anything like that. It was pitiful in it's own way that it took a rich influencial person to do something about it all when every poor unknown person would've easily been silenced or dealt with
The dynamics of society in itself were f-ked up if it took a person in higher class to make a change. Suppose, if Himari Aoi wasn't Himari Aoi, then wouldn't her end have been the same as Clara Hughes?
"What are you thinking?" Mari inevitably had to ask since Ian seemed so absorbed in his train of thoughts.
"I'm thinking what could've been done differently to avoid everyone and everything we have lost up till now..." Ian responded.
It didn't make much sense to Mari but nevertheless she accompanied him in standing there.
She also sighed when he sighed.
"Okay, let's go home"
"Finally, I have to pee"
"Uh..Why didn't you say so..."
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"She's different"
"Different how?"
Aoi sat fidgeting on the chair having a one on one meeting with the head of the hospital who had specifically came down to check upon this 'miracle alpha child' who has an influence on other alphas.
"We're still going through with alot of tests and it's really a huge step forward, this could literally be a new form of human evolution and since the news has spread into the medical world, everyone wants to know about the future of human evolution" The doctor spoke passionately, not that it bothered Aoi that he was most probably talking of her daughter as some kind of science lab test subject but she didn't like the idea of her daughter getting invasive attention.
"While I have nothing against science and evolution, I would like my daughter to be not bothered like that" Aoi made herself clear.
" I apologize ma'am, it's simply just fascinating because it has never happened before, moreover, we need to compile data anyways to ensure that this child would be able to grow healthily... " The doctor molded his words. Nonetheless, it did make Aoi wonder if being like that was really okay for the baby.
Everything aside, she did have parental concerns over those weird pheromones and how they could impact her daughter's life.
"Is everything else normal? Is she going to be okay?" There was a visible line on Aoi's forehead, one that would pop up every now and then while she was stressed.
Two hours into parenting and she was already getting the gist of stress that children tend to cause.
"Everything seems to be normal for now" The doctor reassured her as he closed the file of Himari Yui.
On top of the case file, there was a bold word that caught Aoi's interest and she couldn't help but ask what it meant.
"Oh this? The doctors thought that it would be quite hard to refer to her as an alpha with pheromones that effect other alphas everytime, so they came up with a new term after consensus to refer to her" The doctor tapped onto the bold word with his index finger.
"That's an interesting term..." Aoi responded as she took the file from him momentarily and read the word aloud with a half perplexed and half impressed tone...
"Enigma...."