My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 687

Chapter 687

His gaze softened in a way thad only seen a handful of times.

“Raphael, if anyone can convince her to speak, it’s you.”

I looked away, the words never reached my mouth because another thought had already taken their place.

Scars.

My breathing slowed by instinct. Images surfaced one after another. The first time I had seen the marks beneath her feet. Some were new, some were old, layered over one another.

The faint lines on the inside of her thighs, barely visible unless the light caught them at the right angle.

I remembered tracing them with my eyes, wondering how someone could hurt themselves in a place they worked so hard to hide.

She had brushed it off.

Another memory followed, one that had never made sense. My fingers moving through her hair, and then I felt it, there had been tiny ridges against her scalp. Hidden beneath thick strands where no one would ever notice them unless they were scarching.

I remembered asking if she’d bumped her head as a child. She’d gone quiet, then changed the subject.

At the time, I hadn’t questioned it. Now, I wished I had. Then another image surfaced. The narrow marks scattered across her back, just pale lines that crossed her skin.

I remembered standing behind her, trying to make sense of them. Their placement had bothered me. Some sat so high that she could never have reached them herself. Others rested near the center of her back, awkward places, impossible angles.

I had assumed they came from her own hands. A punishment she had invented for herself.

I began at the beginning. Her birth records contained nothing unusual. Routine hospital visits, vaccinations, yearly checkups, childhood illnesses, broken fevers, growth charts. Everything looked painfully ordinary. The reports described a healthy little girl whose life should have followed the same simple path as every other child. Yet I already knew that somewhere beyond those pages, everything had changed. The records showed me her body. They told me nothing about her life.

The next folders belonged to her schools. Attendance sheets. Teacher evaluations. Standardized test scores. Handwritten notes from counselors. I read each page carefully, looking for anything that had been overlooked years ago.

One psychological assessment caught my attention. It had been completed when she was still very young. I opened it and slowly read through every page.

The report diagnosed dyslexia and dysgraphia. Yet every section measuring logical reasoning, mathematics, visual patterns, and abstract thinking scored far above average.

I found myself thinking about every report she had nervously handed to me at work. Every email she apologized for before I had even opened it. Every meeting where she solved problems that senior analysts couldn’t see, only to become embarrassed over a single spelling mistake. Those school records didn’t teach me something new about Gianna.

As the years passed through the files, the comments from her teachers began repeating themselves. Quiet. Respectful. Keeps to herself. Rarely asks for help. Performs exceptionally well in mathematics but struggles with written assignments. There were no disciplinary reports. No fights. No complaints about bad behavior. Only a little girl who slowly learned that silence attracted less attention than asking for help

Another folder carried the logo of a ballet academy. I opened it, expecting little more than attendance records, but instead I found years of performance evaluations and competition reports.