Marriage with my daughter's father: Darling please be gentle - Chapter 248

Chapter 248: Chapter 248: What do you want to know?

Back inside the warehouse, a tense silence thickened the air—heavy, suffocating. Lilac shifted uneasily as the prolonged stare-off between Reeve and Stanley dragged on, the tension between them pulsing like a ticking time bomb.

Despite being cornered—warned, threatened, and bloodied—Reeve remained infuriatingly silent. His lips, cracked and stained with dried blood, stayed stubbornly shut. Not even the looming promise of death seemed to shake him.

Stanley, the embodiment of cold, controlled menace, stood still as a statue. His striking face remained unreadable, but Lilac didn’t miss the twitch in his jaw or the darkness creeping into his eyes. His patience was hanging by a thread.

The silence scraped at her nerves.

“How long are you two going to keep staring at each other?” Lilac snapped, her voice sharp enough to slice through steel.

She had expected Reeve to crack by now. He was trapped—no allies, no escape—and with Stanley towering over him like death dressed in designer, it should’ve been over. Easy. But neither man so much as blinked.

The space between them crackled with unspoken threats, thick with tension and something else—something uglier. History, maybe.

Stanley finally stepped forward, voice calm, but laced with venom.

“I’ll ask you one last time,” he said, eyes narrowing into slits. “Who are you working for—and how do you know Victor Stokeholm?”

Lilac felt the shift instantly.

Stanley’s voice had lost its edge of restraint. It had gone cold. Flat. And his eyes—once piercing—were now sheer fury. It wasn’t just anger burning behind them. It was promise. The kind that ended with blood on the concrete.

She had seen Stanley at his worst. In the ring, he was a beast. But outside of it? He was lethal. Trained by her brother to be merciless, methodical, and unrelenting. Their enemies were nothing to him. Insects to be crushed.

And yet, with Reeve, he had held back—until now.

A flicker passed across Reeve’s face. A crease of recognition. Then—

“Victor Stokeholm?” he echoed, frowning in confusion. “How do you know him?”

Wrong answer.

Stanley’s chair scraped back with a sharp screech as he rose to his full height. His frame blocked the light above, casting a long shadow that swallowed Reeve whole. He didn’t just loom—he eclipsed.

Lilac flinched. Reeve’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

Stanley didn’t just look angry—he looked transformed. Like something ancient and furious had stepped into his skin.

“You don’t get to ask questions,” he said, voice barely above a growl. “Not when you’re the one sitting on borrowed time.”

Reeve opened his mouth to protest, but he was too slow.

Stanley’s fist slammed into his jaw, snapping Reeve’s head sideways with a sickening crack. Blood sprayed from his split lip as he groaned, slumping sideways in the chair.

Lilac winced. That wasn’t just a warning hit.

Stanley wasn’t done.

He grabbed Reeve by the collar and yanked him upright, driving his knee into Reeve’s gut with brutal force. The wind left Reeve’s lungs in a single, strangled grunt. Before he could recover, Stanley struck again—this time a punch to the ribs, then another to the side of the head.

“Start talking!” Stanley barked, voice echoing like thunder.

Reeve wheezed, spitting blood. His body curled inward on instinct, but Stanley caught him by the throat and shoved him back against the chair, metal legs screeching as it scraped across the concrete floor.

“You think I came here to dance around your lies?” Stanley growled. His face was inches from Reeve’s, his hand still clenched around his throat.

Reeve coughed violently, choking on blood and breath.

Lilac folded her arms, impatience flaring. “Mister, what are you waiting for—Christmas?” she snapped. “Either you start talking or we start digging your grave.”

Something finally broke in Reeve’s eyes. The cockiness drained. The defiance cracked.

“Alright! Alright!” he gasped.

There was something about this man that screamed animosity and instead of playing with the devil himself he finally decided to co-opterate.

“What do you want to know?” Reeve said this time in submission.

***

The funds hadn’t gone through. No notification. No confirmation. Nothing.

Alexander’s eyes remained fixed on the blank screen of his phone, unblinking. A muscle ticked in his jaw as frustration curled through him. With a sharp exhale, he nearly tossed the device aside—but stopped the second it buzzed in his hand.

His brows lifted with hope, thinking it might be Reeve. Instead, the screen lit up with a message from Gina.

“I wonder how long Mr. Alexander will take to schedule another meeting.”

His eyes narrowed. The corners of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but not annoyance either. He leaned back into his chair, fingers moving swiftly over the keys.

“Not too late, but maybe sooner than expected.”

He hit send and placed the phone back on the table, his expression shifting once again.

The glint in his eyes dimmed, replaced by a familiar shadow, one that always followed thoughts of her.

Gina Morris.

The woman had intrigued him from the moment their paths crossed. Not just because she was beautiful. He’d met enough beautiful women to last a lifetime but because she was unreadable. Like a mystery wrapped in silk and shadows. Every encounter with her left him wanting more… and knowing less.

She acted compliant, even flirtatious at times, but something told him it was all a performance. Beneath that soft voice and those clever smiles was a mind that calculated every move.

And yet, despite all his resources, all his connections, she remained an enigma. No past. No ties. No trace.

Alexander leaned forward, elbows resting on the desk, staring into nothing.

“Who are you, Gina Moris?” he murmured under his breath, his voice low and contemplative.

It gnawed at him, the way she lingered in his mind longer than she should. The way her presence felt… familiar. As if being near her stirred memories buried long ago. Forgotten names. Forgotten faces. A ghost from a past he’d shut the door on years back.

His jaw clenched.

The unsettling part wasn’t that he couldn’t find anything about her.

It was that something about her made him feel like she already knew everything about him.