Crippled By The Fake Heiress — And She Regretted It Chapter 06
The next day. The ribbon-cutting ceremony for Gina’s new company.
Don Scarla’s phone rang—it was the doctor.
“This is bad, Mr. Scarla! Miss Valentina seems to know the truth about the accident five years ago! She heard what we said in the hospital room that day!”
Don Scarla’s face went white. He hung up and tried to call me, only to find my phone had been off for hours.
“Dad, the ceremony’s about to start. Come on.”
Gina tugged him toward the stage. But before he could take hold of the red ribbon, a commotion was already building below.
“That’s him, right? The patriarch of the Scarla family. Heartless bastard—covering for his adopted daughter while his real daughter rots in a wheelchair. Unbelievable!”
“Wait—doesn’t the person next to him look familiar? Isn’t that the adopted daughter?”
Alessio rushed up to the stage, phone in hand, panic-stricken. “Dad! Something’s happened! We need to go—now!”
Don Scarla let himself be dragged away, leaving a bewildered Gina frozen on the platform.
In the car, Alessio drove like a man possessed. Donna kept demanding to know what was going on.
It wasn’t until they were home—after Alessio found the emergency heart pills and made Donna take one—that he finally spoke.
“Valentina knows we’ve been lying to her!”
“What?!”
Donna’s face was pure shock.
Don Scarla sighed. “The doctor just called me too. Said Valentina heard everything we discussed in the hospital room. I already told him to come to the house—we’ll figure it out when he gets here.”
Alessio cut him off urgently: “There’s no time to wait, Dad. Valentina uploaded all the evidence online!”
He thrust his phone into Don Scarla’s hands.
The more Don Scarla scrolled, the paler he became. He tapped the audio file. There it was—every word he’d spoken to the doctor while I lay under anesthesia.
The comment section was a wall of fury.
Donna took one look and collapsed, clutching her chest.
[A tiger wouldn’t eat its own cub! Lying to his biological daughter for the sake of an adopted one—wanting her disabled for life. Absolutely despicable!]
[Did you see where they said they tricked her into handing over the evidence so they could destroy it? That’s a CRIME!]
[Hey, the husband already issued a victim’s pardon in writing. Black and white, legally binding. Even if it is criminal, she won’t serve time!]
The public grew more outraged by the minute, demanding to know if the guilty could really just escape punishment like this.
Alessio rubbed Donna’s chest as phone calls poured in—all of them asking whether he’d really been two-timing.
Don Scarla stared at the leaked records from Alessio’s second account and erupted:
“Didn’t I tell you never to leave any evidence?! You didn’t delete the chat logs—you even posted photos on Moments—are you a complete imbecile?!”
Alessio looked stung. “Dad, how was I supposed to know Valentina would go through my phone and find my second account?”
The doctor arrived shortly after. He handed every piece of evidence to Don Scarla, shaking his head with repeated sighs.
“Mr. Scarla, I said everything I needed to say a long time ago. You wouldn’t listen, and now my personal information has been exposed. I’m going back overseas. Everything was done at your request—it was never my intention. I trust the public will judge for themselves when they hear the recordings. Consider whatever debt I owed you from before repaid in full. Goodbye.”
He stood and walked out without waiting for Don Scarla to respond.
Before leaving the country, the doctor posted a public statement distancing himself from the affair. In the recordings, he had indeed tried repeatedly to talk Don Scarla out of it—so the public didn’t give him too hard a time.
Just as Don Scarla was drowning in crisis calls from every subsidiary under the Scarla empire, Gina arrived.
“Dad! What do we do now? Reporters showed up at my office asking if I was Gina—I had to show them my new ID just to get out of there!”
“You absolutely cannot let my identity get exposed!”
Looking at how self-centered she was, a flicker of something calculating passed through Don Scarla’s eyes.
“The housekeeper says your sister left last night. I had people check—she’s gone abroad.”
“While we’re looking for her, you need to come forward voluntarily. Say you were young and reckless back then, that you hurt her—that’s the best way to resolve this.”
“You have the victim’s pardon anyway. You won’t go to prison.”
Gina shook her head vehemently. “No! Dad, have you forgotten? Alessio and she never actually registered the marriage! If that comes out, I could still go to prison. Absolutely not!”
Don Scarla’s expression darkened. “Then what do you suggest?”
“I’ll go back overseas and hide, same as before. You just tell everyone Valentina’s lost her mind, making things up—the audio is AI-generated, the chat logs are photoshopped. Problem solved!”
Hearing this, it wasn’t just Don Scarla—Alessio and Donna were shaking with rage too.
“You’d run off overseas and dump this disaster in our laps?”
“Do you have any idea that audio can be forensically verified? You can’t just claim it’s fake and make it so!”
“And those chat logs—because of them, I’ve been torn apart online. People are asking if I’m some kind of two-timing bigamist and want me arrested for it!”
Alessio blocked her path. “Five years ago we cleaned up your mess. This time, you face it with us!”
“Besides—you just had to show off, sending those messages and photos to provoke her. I’d say you’ve been living a little too comfortably!”
Gina turned to plead with her parents.
But this time, even Donna spoke up, pressing a hand to her chest.
“Gina. Have we spoiled you so badly all these years? You knew you needed to keep a low profile coming back, and yet you left all that ammunition in Valentina’s hands. You goaded her. If it weren’t for your provocation, she never would have put your father and me in the crosshairs like this!”
“You have no idea how to behave.”
Gina was about to fire back when her phone rang.
She glanced at the screen and her face transformed.
“Valentina hired a lawyer to send me a demand letter! She knows the evidence isn’t bulletproof and she’s doing this just to humiliate me?”
“Who told her my current name?!”
She glared at the three of them, eyes cold and dangerous.
What she didn’t realize was that her new name had been easy to find. The real estate company her parents had opened for her listed the legal representative as Jian Ren—Gina using Donna’s maiden surname, Jian. I’d guessed it effortlessly.
Her parents and Alessio were startled by the venom on her face.
In twenty-five years, she had never once shown them an expression this savage.
“You suspect us?”
Don Scarla pointed at her, incredulous, and erupted.
“If we wanted to sell you out, we would’ve handed you over five years ago right after the accident! Why would we go to all this trouble—faking your drowning, sending you abroad to live the good life!”
“And this is what we get? You ungrateful wretch!”
Gina reined in her fury and softened her tone.
“That’s not what I meant, Mom, Dad. I’ve always known how good you’ve been to me. It’s just—if I have to appear in court, my reputation as a businesswoman will be ruined. How am I supposed to run a company after that?”
“What company?! You’re still thinking about that worthless company at a time like this! Tomorrow you’re selling that building—and once this blows over, you’re going straight back overseas. Quietly.”
Hearing her father’s implication that she’d have to appear in court, a fierce resistance flashed through Gina’s eyes.
But in the end, she said nothing more.