Du Feng trembled all over, as if all his strength had been drained. He slumped to the ground, his lips trembling but unable to utter a single sound.
This was the most hidden sin between him and Xia Lian. He thought no one would ever know about it in his lifetime!
"What a pity,"
There was a strange sense of irony in Pei Jiangmu's voice, as if fate was playing tricks on them.
"Man proposes, God disposes. You calculated everything, but you didn't count on Zhaozhao being so smart, nor did you expect... the unexpected guest."
His eyes became distant, as if he had fallen into that dusty memory.
"Actually, Zhaozhao had already heard your wife secretly making a phone call to arrange people."
"Du Feng, have you ever thought that from the moment she was taken into the car by you, all the way, she was looking forward to it, looking forward to whether you would stop them."
"Pity, you didn't. You just coldly watched her being driven out of the car."
"She knew she was going to be sold, so as soon as the car drove away, instead of standing there crying in fear, she ran desperately along the road in the direction she came from!"
"She wanted to run back to the villa area. She wanted to ask for help!"
"She was so young, running desperately on the dark winding mountain road, tired and scared."
"And just when she was about to fall due to exhaustion..."
Pei Jiangmu's voice paused.
When he spoke again, there was a complex emotion that even he himself didn't notice, a mixture of pain and a sense of fate.
"A black minivan, as if out of control, suddenly rushed out from the turn and directly knocked her down."
Du Feng and Xia Lian suddenly looked up, their eyes full of disbelief.
Pei Jiangmu looked at them, the cruel arc of his lips deepening.
"Are you curious why, at such a late hour and in such a desolate place, there happened to be a car passing by? And it 'happened' to take her away?"
He laughed softly, and the laughter echoed in the empty factory building, looking extremely strange.
"Let me tell you. That car wasn't just passing by. It was the car of the kidnappers who kidnapped me!"
He pointed at himself, his eyes sinister.
"At that time, I was knocked out by them and thrown into the trunk of that car."
"They were in a hurry to transfer me to another hiding place."
"Because they were driving too fast and on a winding mountain road, they knocked down Zhaozhao who suddenly ran out."
"The kidnappers were scared out of their wits at that time. They thought they had killed someone and were afraid of the matter being exposed."
"They got out of the car to check and found that Zhaozhao was still alive but unconscious."
"They didn't dare to leave her at the scene, nor did they dare to send her to the hospital.
"In a hurry, they simply stuffed her into the trunk as well and threw her in with me!"
"So..."
Pei Jiangmu's gaze was like the sharpest knife, scraping at Du Feng and Xia Lian's souls.
"It wasn't that she deliberately got to know me. It was the misfortune you arranged that collided with my misfortune.
"It was the human - trafficking you carefully planned that, by a strange coincidence, made her and me... meet in that situation."
He looked at Du Feng's face that had completely lost its color, full of shock, fear and absurdity. Slowly, word by word, he delivered the final fatal blow.
"Du Feng, what were you thinking when the human - traffickers couldn't find her back then?"
"As far as I know, no one organized a large - scale search there. That means after she was thrown out of the car, you didn't even look for her at all.
"Whether she was sold into the mountains or fell off a cliff on a night road, you simply didn't care.
"Since you didn't care about her at all, then why did you insist on taking her away from France eleven months ago?"
There was a deathly silence in the factory building.
The only sounds were Du Feng and Xia Lian's heavy and desperate gasps, as well as Du Xixi and Du Changlin's soft sobs because they couldn't digest this shocking secret.
Pei Jiangmu stood in the midst of the mess and despair.
Like a vengeful king returning from hell, he watched the collapse of his enemies, and the crazy desire for destruction in his heart was sickly satisfied for a moment.
But deep in his eyes, the bottomless void that had cracked because of Meng Ruozhao's coma was still gurgling with pain and violence.
The reckoning had just begun.
Du Feng slumped on the ground like a fish out of water, gasping for air. Cold sweat had already soaked through his back.
Pei Jiangmu's words were like a rusty saw, tugging back and forth in his mind.
The dusty memory fragments that he himself had deliberately blurred were pieced together again.
Actually, Pei Jiangmu was a bit wrong.
He had looked for Meng Ruozhao back then.
Of course, not because he was worried about her.
It was because Xia Lian had vowed that she had arranged everything properly and it would be foolproof.
But in the end, those people didn't "pick up" the person, which made them worried that she had been taken away by others and their plan would be exposed.
So after they learned that Meng Ruozhao was really gone, they had to pretend to look for her.
After "searching" for a few days with no results, he lost his patience again.
During that time, for some reason, the security in every street and alley in Haicheng was very strict, and there were often policemen patrolling.
He didn't want to cause any trouble, so he could only ask Xia Lian to completely cut off contact with those people.
Then they announced to the outside world that Meng Ruozhao had gone missing because of her playfulness.
Xia Lian was really worried for a while back then. She said what if Meng Ruozhao came back one day and would others know what they had done.
Du Feng told her to shut up and keep this matter a secret.
Actually, he wasn't worried about Meng Ruozhao coming back.
Because so many days had passed and no one had sent her back, it meant she wouldn't come back.
He preferred to think that in that pitch - black night, Meng Ruozhao had fallen off the cliff in panic because of fear.
This speculation didn't make him feel heart - broken, but rather relieved—
The daughter left by his ex - wife, who was becoming more and more like her mother and seemed to be constantly reminding him of his past disgrace, had finally "reasonably" disappeared.
Whether she was dead or alive didn't matter at all.
He was so complacent at that time that he didn't even inquire about why there was such strict security.
Now it seemed that it was because Pei Jiangmu had been kidnapped...
After the initial shock, a more absurd and terrifying thought popped into Du Feng's mind.
He suddenly looked up at the young man who was like a dark Asura and asked hoarsely.
"Then later... was Zhaozhao adopted by your Pei family?"
"No wonder... no wonder it was rumored that Mr. Pei Ting had two sons and a daughter, and that mysterious young lady never showed up... Could it be..."
He wanted to say, could Meng Ruozhao be the well - protected, rumored daughter of the Pei family?
If so, everything made sense!
They had become a family.
So Pei Jiangmu would be a part - time employee beside her and obediently call her sister...
They had come back to take revenge on his Du family.
No wonder she had lost her memory soon after someone said they saw her in France.
At that time, he thought it would be convenient for him to take her back.
Unexpectedly, it was very likely that she had planned it. She was just pretending to have lost her memory and coming back to take revenge on him.
That little bitch Meng Ruozhao was as scheming as her dead mother.
He shouldn't have left her alive back then. He should have made sure she was really dead after falling!