The Bad Boy's Dirty Little Secret BL Chapter 102: Silence over Truth

Kai’s P.O.V

His words rang in my ears on a loop; the very first failure of my life. I felt a chill creep down my spine, a hollow dread settling in my stomach. I’d thought I was prepared for answers, but nothing could’ve readied me for what he had just said.

“What do you mean, Dad?” I managed to ask. I stared at him as he sat there, shoulders hunched, looking like a man haunted by something far beyond my understanding.

He drew a long, unsteady breath, and his gaze drifted somewhere far away, beyond the room, beyond this moment. “People say you never forget your first kill,” he said, the words raw and unfiltered, as if speaking them aloud for the first time. “And for me… that was true. I hurt someone, Kai. Not intentionally, but… it happened. A judgment call I should never have made.”

He paused before continuing, “It was meant to help, but it ended in tragedy. I took a life, Kai, even if I never meant to. And that is a weight I’ll carry to the end.”

I could see the pain etched into every line on his face, hear it in the tremble of his voice. This was the secret he’d buried, the scar he couldn’t let heal. And it was tied to Jonathan, to Night’s family, and to a history darker than I could’ve imagined.

“Dad, please, stop talking in riddles. Just… tell me the truth. What do you mean? Who did you kill?”

He hesitated, his jaw tightening as if bracing himself. Finally, he looked up at me, his eyes carrying the weight of a name I’d never heard but would never forget from now on.

“Matthias Kolinsky,” he said. “He was the first patient I lost… due to a misdiagnosis.”

The name lingered in the air, unfamiliar but somehow carrying an ominous presence. I stared at my father, feeling both closer to the truth and yet still missing the final piece.

“But… what does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

My father’s face fell, his gaze dropping to the floor. “Matthias… was Jonathan’s lover,” he said quietly. “They were partners. And when Matthias died because of my mistake, Jonathan never forgave me. I don’t know if he ever will.”

I felt the ground shift beneath me, my entire world tilting as my father’s words sunk in. This wasn’t real—it couldn’t be. “Are you… are you serious?” I demanded, my voice shaking. “This isn’t some kind of twisted prank you’re pulling, right?”

My father looked up at me, and in his eyes, I saw no humor, no relief, only the hollow weight of a pain he’d been carrying alone for years. “Kai,” he said softly, his voice breaking a little, “who would joke about something like this? About someone’s death?”

His words were like a punch to the gut. This wasn’t a story, a misunderstanding, or some cruel joke. It was the truth—ugly, raw, and utterly real. I felt my legs go weak as I struggled to make sense of it all, the pieces falling into place in ways I wished they wouldn’t. Jonathan’s bitterness, his hatred… it all made sense now.

“But… why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because I didn’t want you to carry this burden,” he replied, his face twisted in regret. “I wanted you to be free of it. But I see now that secrets only make things worse. I should’ve told you… long ago.” He sighed. “But it wasn’t until today that I realized how my past had come back to haunt me. I though the surname Winters was a coincidence, after all, several people can have the same surname. But I never thought…”

My father shook his head, taking a deep breath as he started to unravel the story that had haunted him for so long.

“Jonathan and Matthias had been driving back from a celebration—a small anniversary, just the two of them. Then, out of nowhere, a car swerved into their lane. The accident itself wasn’t fatal, but… Matthias turned the car at the last moment, angling it so he’d take the brunt of the impact.

“When they admitted Matthias to the ICU, we thought his injuries were the only problem. But during surgery, my team and I found a mass in his brain. At first, I thought it was just a clot—a result of the head trauma, but I was so, so wrong. As we investigated, it became clear… it wasn’t just blood. It was Glioblastoma., a kind of fast-growing cancerous tumor in the brain.

“It was already at stage three,” he continued, “and the crash had caused the tumor to rupture, making it spread faster. Instead of months or years, he suddenly had weeks, maybe even days.”

I could see the guilt in his eyes, the grief from a memory he’d clearly tried to bury. “Jonathan was… devastated. And I… well, I was the one who had to deliver the news, and when I told Jonathan the truth, that Matthias was going to die… he was inconsolable. He kept blaming himself, saying the accident was his fault, that if they hadn’t been arguing, Matthias would still be alive.”

“What were they arguing about?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

He sighed, looking down at his hands. “Jonathan told me it was about how Matthias had been distant. Jonathan couldn’t understand it, felt that Matthias was slipping away. He thought Matthias had stopped loving him, that he was hiding something. And in a way, he was.”

“Because of the tumor,” I whispered. “Did he already know about the tumor?”

My father nodded slowly. “Glioblastoma affects not only the body but often the mind and behavior. Matthias’s personality had started to change, but Jonathan… he thought it was personal. By the time they knew the truth, it was too late.”

My father’s voice grew quieter, almost reverent. “Matthias held on for nearly a month, but the disease progressed quickly. Toward the end, he could barely recognize Jonathan. I think that hurt Jonathan most of all—the one person he loved slipping away, until even his memory was gone.”

A painful silence filled the room, and I struggled to process it all. The tragedy surely left a scar on Jonathan that no amount of time could heal.

Now my father turned to look at me, his face etched with a remorse that seemed to age him by decades. “If only… if only I had caught it sooner,” he murmured, his voice cracking at the seams. “Maybe we could have intervened, given Matthias a chance. Maybe even a few more months, enough time for him to be himself, to say goodbye.”

He swallowed hard, his gaze dropping, his hands clenched tightly in his lap. “But I missed it. I failed him, Kai. I failed to protect my patient, and because of that, Jonathan suffered a loss I can never undo. A grief he carries to this day.”

For the first time, I saw my father not as the infallible figure I’d always known, but as a man haunted by his own humanity, by the limits of what he could do.

The guilt had hollowed him out, and I understood now why he’d wanted to keep it from me, why he had chosen silence over truth.

But most of all, it was the revelation about Jonathan that shook me to the core.