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Chapter 25
publish date:
2026-03-27 16:53:29
Latest chapter
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 28
POV: Nora The watch had a false back. I had owned it for two years, had held it a hundred times, and had never known. The back panel released with pressure applied at a specific point along the lower edge, and inside the shallow space behind the mechanism was a folded square of paper so thin it had clearly been cut to fit. A twelve-digit number. Nothing else. I had stared at it for a long time before photographing it and putting it back. An account number was my first thought, but the format was wrong for any standard banking structure I recognized. I sent the photograph to the email address that had contacted me and got no response. Whatever it unlocked, I wasn't meant to access it alone. I hadn't told Elias about the watch's interior. I was still deciding how much that said about the current state of things between us. The gala was on a Friday. Elias had sourced the ticket three weeks before the event, a donation-level entry under the name Claire Marsh, a persona with enough
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 27
POV: Nora I sat with what she'd said about Elias for a long moment. Twice as a witness. Once as a suspect. I didn't let it show on my face because I had been practicing not letting things show on my face for months and I was getting competent at it. But underneath the practiced neutrality I was doing the rapid, uncomfortable work of reassessing a foundation I had built a significant amount of weight on. "Tell me about the suspect angle," I said. Chen's expression didn't change. She'd expected the question. "Elias Vance was connected to your father professionally for over a decade. When William died, Elias was one of the last people to have contact with him. Phone records show a call between them the night before the death, forty minutes long." She kept her voice level. "He was interviewed once, briefly, before the case was closed. His answers were cooperative and vague in equal measure. The kind of vague that's hard to challenge directly." "That makes him a person of interest, n
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 26
POV: Nora I didn't sleep after the email. I forwarded it to Elias at two in the morning and he was awake when it arrived, which told me he hadn't been sleeping either, though neither of us acknowledged that. He responded in four words. *Don't reply. I'll investigate.* I put the phone down and lay in the dark and thought about what it meant that my father had concealed a person. Not money, not documents, not assets. A person who had been looking for me since he died. The prenatal appointment at nine was at a clinic Elias had switched me to three weeks ago, different from the original, different name on the file, a precaution against whoever had accessed my medical records. The midwife was brisk and efficient and the baby's heartbeat on the monitor was strong and steady, which was the only thing in my life that felt uncomplicated. I was outside on the pavement afterward, coat buttoned, working out the walk back, when someone fell into step beside me. "Nora Ashford." Not a question.
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 25
POV: Nora I called Elias back within the hour. Not because of the kiss, I told myself. Because of the message. Because someone had been watching the lobby and had footage and was now holding it as a threat, and that was an operational problem that required an immediate response regardless of everything else. He picked up on the first ring. "I got a message," I said. "Someone has lobby footage." Silence for two seconds. "Forward it to me." I did. He called back four minutes later. "The camera covering that angle was accessed remotely at some point in the last forty-eight hours. Someone cloned the feed." His voice was controlled. "I'm coming back." He arrived in twenty minutes. We sat at the table and worked through the security breach methodically, traced the access point, identified the gap, closed it. It took two hours and neither of us mentioned what had happened before he left. The work required full attention and full attention was easier than the alternative. By the time
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 24
POV: Nora The new apartment was on the fourth floor of a building with two separate exits, a doorman who worked twenty-four hours, and a camera covering every corridor. Elias had it ready within three hours of leaving the last place, which told me he'd had it prepared before the situation required it. That was the first thing I filed away. The second was the man he posted outside. Not obviously, not in a uniform. Just someone who was always in the lobby when I came and went, reading a newspaper with the particular stillness of a person who was not actually reading. I didn't say anything for four days. I watched, noted, and said nothing, because four days ago I had been shaken enough by the email and the medical file breach that the security had felt like protection rather than what it actually was. On the fifth day I found the device. It was under the kitchen counter, small, magnetic, attached to the underside of the cabinet where it would survive a casual search without difficu
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 23
POV: Nora I never got to see the footage from the study. Elias's phone rang before he could pull it up, and the call lasted long enough that by the time he came back to the table his attention had shifted entirely. Something had moved in the legal case, a filing Marcus's team had submitted that needed a response before morning. We spent the next three hours on that and the study footage stayed closed on the laptop between us like something we'd agreed without speaking to leave alone for now. I thought about it after he left. What Marcus had said about me on a call six weeks ago, in a room where he believed no one was listening. Elias had described it as not what a man says about a transaction he's already closed, and then said nothing further, and I had let him leave without pressing because I wasn't sure I was ready for the answer. That was a problem I was developing. Knowing when I was avoiding things because they were tactically irrelevant and when I was avoiding them because I
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