It Is Not Your Child?!

“When will it stop…”

As she gazed out the window at the thin falling snowflakes, a deep sigh escaped her lips.

‘White flakes of shit falling from the sky.’

There was no laughter. The joke from a previous life had turned into a harsh reality. It’s been three weeks since she’s been stuck in a village inn at the foot of the mountain, unable to cross the range because of the snow.

In the meantime, her worries had grown as big as her belly.

‘I’d like to settle down before giving birth, but I’m not sure if it’s possible.’

She stroked her belly, which was now passing the six-month mark, and reached for the baby clothes she’d been making.

“Baby mama.”

The innkeeper knocked on her door, calling her by a title that was three months too early.

She was probably not here to hurry her for the accommodation fee, was she?

Erica rose from her seat by the window. Her movements were slow because of the heaviness of her body. Holding onto her waist with both hands, she shuffled towards the door, but the innkeeper couldn’t wait and knocked on the door again.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming.”

What on earth is going on that is making her so hasty?

When she opened the door, the landlady spoke incoherently.

“Baby Mama, remember you complained about not having enough money just yesterday?”

“Yes? Yes, I did.”

‘I hadn’t used such a cheap expression to say that though.’

“An opportunity to earn money has come up.”

“Is that so?”

The landlady excitedly chatted away, pointing towards the old staircase as if it were her own business.

“Last night, a young couple checked into the room below, and it seems the lady there is pregnant. She looked well-off, so when I mentioned that we have a midwife at our inn, she asked me to call her. Go check it out quickly.”

“Thank you.”

Erica decided to go down to the lower floor to assess the condition of the pregnant woman and knocked on the door of the room the innkeeper had mentioned.

“What’s going on?”

A man’s voice from behind the door inquired about the purpose, sounding cautious, as if he were wary of uninvited guests. Maybe he had forgotten about calling for someone.

“You called for a midwife….”

I thought everything was fine, but the real surprise came when the door swung open.

“…Roderick?”

Black hair, deep blue eyes. Slightly rougher than in her memory, but with unmistakable features.

“…Erica?”

Above all, her name reflexively escaped his lips.

The man who had opened the door was Erica’s childhood friend and fiancé, Roderick.

“You… You were alive?”

The happiness of seeing her first love being alive, whom she thought was dead, was short-lived.

“Aah!”

A scream echoed from behind Roderick. The person lying on the bed in the room was a woman, and she was in full labor.

At that moment, Erica’s mind summarised the situation in just a few sentences.

The father of her child, whom she thought was dead is back.

With a woman who clearly got pregnant before her.

Yes, she had been deceived in a crude way. The genre of her current life had turned into a drama again.

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Erica’s past life could be summed up in one word: drama.

She was born as the eldest in a conglomerate family that any Korean would recognize. She wasn’t just born with a silver spoon; she had beauty and brains, making her seemingly flawless.

Until the day she realized she wasn’t the firstborn.

“Say hello. This is your brother.”

Her father, who was known as a philanderer, brought home a hidden love child shortly after her mother passed away from cancer. A ‘brother’ born just ‘two months’ before Erica.

From that day on, being a woman became her weakness.

“Only a male heir can uphold my name.”

Father, do you even know what kind of world we live in these days? Nevertheless, the world of conglomerates was pitifully different.

Although Erica, who had studied abroad, wasn’t considered even as a  potential heir, her “brother” was sent to a prestigious overseas university, all expenses paid, and even pushed for a donation admission. It was a farce.

It didn’t take long for her to realize what was happening. The position of the group’s leader was not meant for her.

Erica knew, but she couldn’t give up.

‘It was mine from the moment I was born.’

So she joined the group and worked hard to prove her abilities, trying to create her own faction within the group. Fortunately, her efforts did not betray her. The business division she led outperformed the rest, and she made her own people along the way.

But in the end…

“It’s always the son who carries on the legacy.”

Her efforts did not betray her, but she was betrayed by a good-for-nothing “Dad.”

The position of the next group leader went to her useless brother who was born only two months earlier with a dick. He was born with a bird’s head instead of a human’s, and he barely managed to get into school and graduated with someone else doing all the work.

The secretary would handle everything, so her brother paraded around with that empty head of his, boasting about his achievements!

Putting a parrot on the throne and saying it’s a king! Does this even make sense?

‘Wait a minute.’

Erica, who had lost her usual grace and was exploding with gradient anger, paused.

This is an insult to parrots, isn’t it? Comparing a smart parrot to that human. I’m sorry, to all the parrots over the world and to their owners too.

So, let’s call him a puppet. A puppet who does exactly as his secretary tells him…

‘Wait a minute.’

She started to lose her composure again and was about to unleash a string of curses when she hesitated once more.

‘Puppet of the secretary?’

At that moment, it struck to her like lightning.

‘Why is it the secretary controlling that man instead of my father?’

Here, the secretary referred to was not her brother’s but her father’s secretary, who had served her father for over twenty years. She had always assumed that the secretary had sided with her ‘brother’ because of her father’s instructions. But her intuition told her something else.

She conducted a background check and discovered that the chief secretary was the one who had brought in the love child secretly born by her father’s former lover.

‘I have a bad feeling about this.’

When she asked if a paternity test had been conducted, the person who presented the test result, which indicated a 99.98% probability of a father-child relationship, was none other than the chief secretary.

A foreboding feeling that this was no longer a mere hunch grew stronger.

To confirm that my hunch was not a hunch, I matched the DNA of my ‘brother’ and the secretary. ….

Paternity probability: 99.98%.

It was messed up.

Whenever someone claimed to be the hidden child of her playboy father, the person who handled the paternity test was none other than the chief secretary. Switching her father’s hair with his own in the middle would have been easy as he trusted him completely.

He would have never guessed that his loyal henchman, with whom he’d fought off scammers targeting the group, was planning to take over the group.

‘It seems you’ve lost your senses, Father. It’s time for you to hand over the group to me.’

If she showed this to her father, the group would be hers.

However, those people were also investigating her. On her way to confront her father with the claim that her brother was not his legitimate child, she was kidnapped.

She was forcibly injected with an unknown substance, lost consciousness, and when she woke up, everything around her was pitch black. She tried to twist her limbs, but she couldn’t move, and there was no place to move to. She was trapped with her hands and feet bound in the cramped trunk of a car.

Struggling to untie the ropes and groaning in pain, Erica looked around in the darkness and smiled in conviction as a green light caught her eye.

‘You bastards.’

Modern cars are equipped with buttons inside the trunk to allow for easy escape even when kidnapped.

So, current Erica felt lucky.

She cautiously opened the trunk of the car, as it sped off somewhere, hoping that if there was another car behind her, she could wave her bound hands out to let them know she was trapped, and they would call the police.

Unfortunately, the car was traveling down a dark, deserted country road. It was ominous.

She had planned to escape on her own when the car would stop after receiving a signal, but it was when she realized that there were no signals here that she despaired. The car suddenly came to a halt.

Click.

It was the sound of the front seat door opening. Finally, she heard footsteps approaching from behind.

“Why did you wake up so soon and start causing trouble? How did you open the trunk?”

“What..and how did you know it was open, ah!”

Only then did she realize. The warning light on the car’s dashboard had indicated that the trunk was open.

She finally understood. She had opened the trunk with just a slight touch.

“Ah, I don’t know.”

Without thinking, she rolled out of the trunk. She didn’t have time to feel the pain as she fell to the dirt floor, and she quickly got up to run away. But the fake brother,  followed her and grabbed her by the hair.

“Ouch! Let go!”

“Hold still, you little mudfish.”

“There, be gentle, master.”

As I was being dragged back to the trunk, I heard a familiar voice. I turned to see the secretary walking out of the passenger seat.

“You’re supposed to be the princess of the group. A misfortunate princess, though.”

The man who had come perilously close to her slapped her dirt-covered cheek lightly and smirked wickedly. Erica clenched her forehead and suppressed the urge to headbutt him.

“Master? you’re being ridiculous. You can’t call your son a son, and he can’t call his father a father. You’re both so pathetic.”

The secretary chuckled. It was like he was deliberately pretending to be relaxed even though he was anxious and falling apart.

“Your appearance is decent enough, so it would have been fine if you just kept your mouth shut and behaved. We were even considering marrying you off, but you just couldn’t keep quiet. Still, you might have some use, so we’ll keep you alive.”

The chief secretary took a leather pouch from his pocket and opened it. Inside was a syringe identical to the one that had pierced her neck when she was kidnapped.

“Give her another dose.”