Episode 5

*Dimitri kuznetsov*

My life has been a mess since the day I was born. First, my mother never loved me and my father even less. In our family, marriages were always arranged, so my parents never loved each other. My mother treated me well only because I shared her blood. She always said that blood is stronger than love. As a child, I didn't believe her, but as I grew up, I started to believe her.

She died when I was six, and my father remarried when I turned seven in another arranged marriage. His wife treated me well in front of him, but as soon as he went to work, she would beat me and lock me in the basement, saying that she didn't want to see my face. When my father traveled for a whole month on business, it was worse because there were days when I wouldn't eat. That was how my childhood was until I was ten. When my father returned from an unexpected trip and asked about me, an employee couldn't keep silent any longer and told him the truth.

That day, my father almost killed her if it weren't for the employees. But since he couldn't lock her up, he drove his family into ruin, and now she is a beggar.

After that woman, my father married another woman who already had a daughter. That marriage wasn't arranged; they supposedly fell in love. But after a year of being married, my father had to travel, and that woman showed her true colors that night. There was a very strong storm, and her son wanted to wear the necklace my mother left me as an inheritance in case I ever had a daughter. I refused, and that woman beat me and threw me out of the mansion. She left me all night in the rain in the garden, which caused me to get sick and be in the hospital for several days. There were many punishments like that when my father traveled. But one day, he told us he was coming back, but since the woman wasn't at home, he didn't know. So I retrieved my mother's necklace to provoke her fury and the fury of her daughter, and it worked. That night, I received the beating of my life, but my plan worked. My father discovered them, and one was locked up in prison while the other ended up in an orphanage. She was twelve, just like me, and no one in her mother's family was willing to take care of her because she was very hateful and mean.

After that, my father didn't try to remarry until I was 17. I was already working in the company, and my grandfather had been pressuring him for five years to remarry. But my father refused, solely for my sake. But I wasn't a child anymore, and I told him that it wouldn't matter if he had a companion while I was away at university. Besides, when I returned, I would move out and start my own life, maybe even get married.

My father agreed to remarry. I stayed for the wedding and then went off to university. His wife wanted to have a child and went through many treatments until she succeeded. My father made me come back for a weekend to celebrate, and his wife prepared her special drink for everyone. When she arrived with the tray, the mansion's doorbell rang, and she went to see who it was. By the time she returned, we had all taken our glasses, so she took the last one remaining on the tray.

It turns out her plan was to give my father a child who would be the sole heir. She poisoned my drink, but before she could hand it to me, the doorbell distracted her from her plan. Not realizing that she had poisoned herself, she took all the drinks from the tray and never knew who drank the poisoned one. So, without realizing it, she poisoned herself and killed her own child. She tried to twist things and said that I had poisoned her so that my brother wouldn't be born.

But after a week of investigation, my father's private investigator uncovered the truth, and that woman ended up in jail. Since then, my father and I were alone. Since then, I started to believe in what my mother had said: blood was the only important thing, not love.

That's why at 27 years old I agreed to get married, and a year later my wife was already pregnant. She and I didn't love each other, but we respected each other. We had plans to raise the child with good principles and make him a good man, but unfortunately, he died on the day the baby was born. Since then, it has been just my father, my son, and me. I didn't want to give my son a stepmother, and my father understood that. He wouldn't suffer like I did.

But things still happened with Anton's nannies. The first we had was irresponsible and let him cry for hours before feeding him. The second left him alone in the car with the doors closed and almost killed him. She is in prison now. So, we decided to move to another country. My father remembered his partner, Angel Walton, and we decided to move to his city and start our new business there, without neglecting our businesses in Russia, of course.

We brought a nanny with us to help with Anton. After what happened with the first nanny, I distrusted them all. So, we also brought a chauffeur.

On the day of the first meeting with Angel Walton, we left the nanny in the car with the baby and the chauffeur. I didn't want Anton to be far from me. I wanted to make sure he was okay. But, unfortunately, the nanny seduced the chauffeur, and they went to have sex in the service room, leaving Anton alone. When I turned on the camera of Anton's favorite doll and saw that only the empty car was there, I panicked. My father and I ran to the parking lot, but there was no one there.

We thought maybe the nanny took him out for a walk, and the chauffeur went with them. But still, we started searching everywhere until Angel Walton asked me and my father to come into his office. His daughter had found a baby in the parking lot when she arrived. He placed his phone on speaker, and the girl explained what had happened. At that moment, I knew I would kill the nanny. When I found her and discovered what had happened through the building's cameras, I was about to kill her and the chauffeur. Angel took them out of the building before I could do it. Then, we rushed to the hospital. I went up to get Anton while my father and Angel waited for us, having coffee.

I realized that my son had fallen in love with Miss Walton. But not everything that shines is always gold. She looked beautiful and sweet, the typical daddy's princess, or so I thought. Anton calls her "mom," and she doesn't mind. Seeing my son infatuated with her bothered me.

But the girl surprised me by revealing that she doesn't have a drop of Walton blood. But how is that possible when it's evident that her father is head over heels in love with her? He trusts her enough to leave the company in her hands while he travels to Russia for a month. I don't understand anything. She is the princess of that family without having their blood. She says that love is the most important thing, but I don't know what that means. I've never felt it, which confuses me. Could it be that love does exist after all?