Coffee, Brownies and the Ruthless CEO (MxM)| FILLING THE VOID series, BOOK 1

44. Chapter - Enough is Enough

VICTOR's POV

I couldn't believe my ears. I was standing in the preparatory room we got in the building where the interview was supposed to take place and wondered for the millionth time why I was even talking to the man who called himself my father. There was no way a parent would intentionally make his child's life hell, right?

"What did you just say?" I asked, feeling a weird sense of déjà vu.

I knew something was awry the moment I arrived. Too many reporters I saw standing in front of the building were from the gutter press, which was not the main audience this interview was called for. We were supposed to talk about the big merge and plans for the future. The wedding date announcement should have been only a by-the-way notice; that was what I saw in the script I got to read on my way here. With the masses outside and their hungry looks for the newest hot topic, though, it looked like it was the opposite.

And my impression was right.

"Don't play dumb. You heard me well enough, Victor. I knew you would be too much of a coward to come clean, so I made sure it got out my way. The last thing we need is a scandal after you get married. There will be too much work to concentrate on when our companies merge." My father was sitting in front of me, looking as calm as always.

Naturally, he was right. After my not-so-friendly conversation with Oliver in the morning, everything became clearer in my mind, and I realized letting the world knew I had a son through television, and with Matt still being only five, was total bullshit. Not to mention Oliver was a guy.

After studying the files I got from my father, I found out the experiment wasn't any secret. When it first started, it was all over the news. Ollie wasn't even the first man to birth a child after the treatments all of the subjects got. But with years passing, all the boom shut down and the majority of people had no idea it even happened – just like me. Subjecting Oliver and Matt to the nightmare reporters could be was out of the question. There had to be another way to make it work without the information getting out.

That was what I hoped for.

Staring at the flat screen behind my father's head, I knew I was naïve. The video of Oliver leaving the house with his boyfriend and our son was playing on TV with inappropriate, almost vulgar comments from some bitch reporter who looked like it was her right to talk about them, and I felt my heart drop. There was no way to fix this. Once big news like this got out, it was impossible to stop it from spreading.

"How could you do this to them? To your grandson? You threw them to the wolves without any chance to prepare for it! The bastards are going to ruin their lives!" I yelled, and for the first time in my life, I felt an urge to leave and never turn back. It was like a sudden awakening. A thread that had been slowly thinning for years just snapped.

"Oh, come on. It would've happened either way. It's better now when he is still a kid. He'll have time to get used to it. If the truth got out later, when he was in his teens, the consequences would've been way worse. A hormonal teenager that had a normal life suddenly becoming a center of attention? He would've ended up on drugs," he said, looking as if he really believed his own words. As if everything he'd done was all right and reasonable.

I was left speechless. How was I supposed to react to something like this? All the insults I knew were too nice for him. This was simply too much. My father was officially going crazy. There was no better explanation than that. No sane person would come up with reasoning as such and think it made sense.

Taking a deep breath, trying to figure out whether to yell at him some more or simply punch him in the face, the door to the room opened. Alison came in, dressed in a white-green suit, looking ready for the interview as never. The only flaw in her looks was an angry scowl that was, for whatever reason, directed at me.