LOGINShare
CHAPTER FIVE: THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
publish date:
2026-06-24 19:40:22"Ask Adrian why your father chose him before your parents died."
The words crashed into me. My entire body froze. For a second, nobody moved, nobody moved, nobody spoke. The stranger stood there calmly, as if he had just revealed something ordinary but nothing about it felt ordinary. My pulse hammered inside my ears. Slowly, I turned towards Adrian. His face had gone completely pale. Fear twisted inside my chest not because of the stranger but because of Adrian's reaction. He knew something and suddenly I was terrified of what that something might be.
"What is he talking about?"
My voice shook. Adrian didn't answer. The silence made my stomach drop.
"Adrian."
Nothing. I took a step forward
"What is he talking about?"
The stranger laughed softly.
"Interesting."
Marcus immediately moved in front of me.
"Who are you?"
The man smiled.
"You can call me Daniel."
"That's not your name."
Daniel's smile widened.
"Maybe not."
Police officers started moving toward him. The moment they did, his expression changed. Not fear. Amusement. As if none of this concerned him. One officer reached for him. Daniel stepped back then looked directly at me. His gaze sent a chill down my spine.
"You've spent your whole life believing a lie."
My chest tightened.
"What lie?"
His eyes shifted toward Adrian.
"Ask your husband."
Adrian's jaw clenched.
"Enough."
The command came out sharp and dangerous. Daniel laughed again.
"Still protecting her from the truth?"
My pulse quickened.
Truth? What's the truth? Nobody was making sense. The officers closed in. Daniel glanced at them then back at me.
"You want to know why someone kidnapped Vivian?"
Fear crawled through me.
"What does that have to do with me?"
His smile disappeared instantly.
"Everything."
The word hit harder than I expected. I felt sick, actually sick because deep down, I knew he was lying. Somehow this had always been about me. The kidnapping, the note, the threat, everything. One officer finally grabbed Daniel's arm, another moved beside him. Daniel didn't resist. That scared me more than if he had. He simply kept staring at me watching, waiting then he spoke.
"Your parents weren't killed in an accident."
The world stopped. My breath caught. No! No!! That wasn't possible. I stared at him.
"What?"
Marcus immediately grabbed my arm.
"Don't listen to him."
But Daniel wasn't looking at Marcus. He was looking at me. Only me .
"They were murdered."
My knees almost gave out. The old pain hit me so suddenly I couldn't breathe. My parents. The people I barely remembered, the people I lost before I could know them. My heart pounded violently.
"You're lying."
Daniel smiled sadly.
"I wish I was."
Adrian stepped forward.
"Take him away."
The command echoed across the harbor. The officers obeyed immediately but before Daniel disappeared , he said one final thing. One sentence. One sentence that shattered whatever stability I had left.
"Your father died protecting something that belongs to you."
Then he was gone. The silence afterwards felt unbearable. I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't process any of it. My head turned slowly toward Adrian. Fear settled inside my chest.
"What does he mean?"
Nobody answered. That answer was enough. Anger exploded through me.
"Stop doing that."
My voice cracked.
"Stop looking at each other."
Marcus looked away. Adrian remained silent. Something inside me snapped.
"I deserve answers."
The words came out louder, sharper and more desperate.
"My parents are dead."
My eyes burned.
"Someone just told me they were murdered."
My chest rose rapidly.
"And both of you are acting like you already knew."
The look on Adrian's face confirmed everything.
He knew. Maybe not everything but enough. Enough to hide it, enough to lie. My stomach twisted.
"You knew."
The accusation hung between us. Adrian rubbed a hand across his face.
"Elena."
"No."
I stepped back.
"Don't."
For the first time since the divorce, genuine panic appeared in his eyes. That terrified me because Adrian never panicked. Ever
"What aren't you telling me?"
His silence stretched. One second, two, three. Every moment felt like torture. Finally Marcus sighed.
"She wasn't supposed to find out this way."
My heart sank. Find out what? My gaze shifted between both men. Neither looked comfortable, neither looked innocent and suddenly I hated them for it.
"You promised me there were no more secrets."
Marcus looked guilty, Adrian looked exhausted. Neither denied it. The realization hurt. Again. Always another secret, always another lie. I laughed bitterly.
"What else?"
Nobody answered. I shook my head.
"Of course."
The police chief approached before anyone could speak. His expression was serious.
"Mr. Knight."
Adrian turned immediately.
"We found something."
The tension returned instantly.
"What?"
The officer handed him a tablet. Adrian looked at the screen then froze,Marcus took it next, his face darkened. My stomach dropped.
"What now?"
Nobody answered. I grabbed the tablet before anyone could stop me. The screen displayed a video. Security footage, a dark warehouse, a woman tied to a chair. Vivian. Fear flashed through me. She looked terrified, weak and shamed then another person entered the frame. The moment I saw him, every breath left my lungs. No! No!! No!!! That couldn't be right. I stared harder. Certainly my eyes were playing tricks on me but they weren't.
The man standing beside Vivian looked familiar. Too familiar because I had seen him before. Many times in photographs, in old family albums, in the few pictures I had left of my childhood. My hand started shaking. The tablet nearly slipped from my fingers. Marcus noticed it.
"What is it?"
I couldn't speak. My throat felt tight. Adrian stepped closer. Concern flashed across his face.
"Elena."
Slowly, I pointed at the screen. My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"I know him."
Both men froze.
"What?"
My pulse thundered painfully. Tears filled my eyes not from sadness but from fear. Pure fear because there was only one explanation. Only one. And I didn't want it to be true. I stared at the man standing beside Vivian then whispered the words that changed everything..
"That's the man who attended my parent's funeral."
Latest chapter
CHASING THE WIFE HE FORCED TO DIVORCE CHAPTER EIGHTY NINE: THE PHOTOGRAPHS
I looked at the photographs for a long time.My parents, young and laughing, standing in front of the building where everything had begun and ended and begun again, and Victor Knight beside them with his arm around my father's shoulder and the particular expression of someone who believed in that moment that the people around him were permanent.Adrian was watching my face.He had seen me pick up the phone and read whatever arrived and had been waiting with the patience he had been learning all day, the patience of someone who understood that not every moment required filling.I turned the phone toward him.He looked at the photographs.Something moved through his face that reached past the present moment into a past he had been a child during, a past his father had never described to him in terms that included laughing in photographs with people he would later destroy."He loved them."Adrian said it quietly, not as a defence, as the complicated truth of someone recognising something
CHASING THE WIFE HE FORCED TO DIVORCE CHAPTER EIGHTY EIGHT: THE NIGHT BEFORE
Clara worked through the night.I knew because she sent three updates between nine and midnight, each one more detailed than the last, each one building toward the same conclusion from different angles, the documentation Victor's legal team had provided was genuine, cross-referenced against independent records and corroborated by transaction data that nobody could have fabricated without access to systems that had been sealed for years.Victor Knight had been preparing this for longer than six weeks.Much longer.The cooperation agreement carried dates going back two years, preliminary contacts with Swiss authorities, preliminary disclosures, a slow careful dismantling of his own operation conducted from a distance while everyone who mattered believed he was dead.I read each update at the table in the café, then later at the apartment Marcus had arranged, a different one from the morning, something Clara had sourced through channels that had no connection to anything Richard's ghost
CHASING THE WIFE HE FORCED TO DIVORCE CHAPTER EIGHTY SEVEN: AFTER THE CALL
I set the phone down on the table.Nobody spoke immediately, the particular silence of people who had heard enough of a conversation to understand its shape without hearing every word, who were sitting inside the weight of it and waiting to see what I did next before they decided what they did next.I looked at the phone.At the Swiss country code still visible on the screen.At the fact of Victor Knight being alive and in Geneva and having called me, having known my lawyer's name, having watched the entire day unfold from a distance and chosen this specific moment to make contact, not after the statement went out, not after Clara filed for the extension, after I said there isn't, after the last thing I had said was something that cost me something and he had heard the cost in my voice and waited for it to settle before the line went dead.That timing wasn't accidental.Nothing about Victor Knight was accidental."What did he say."My mother's voice, even and direct, the voice of some
CHASING THE WIFE HE FORCED TO DIVORCE CHAPTER EIGHTY FIVE: GENEVA
Geneva.One word on a screen and the entire day rearranged itself around it, every thread pulling toward the same point, the surveillance and the ghost employee and the legal challenge and the bank account and the confession that was never what it appeared to be, all of it converging on a city that had been waiting there all along.I looked at Adrian.He was already looking at me.Neither of us spoke, two people who had just arrived at the same place from different directions and were still catching their breath."He's in Geneva."Adrian said it the way you said things that needed air before they could become real."Victor.""Yes."Something moved through his face that he didn't try to control, grief and anger and the devastation of a son discovering that the father he had been grieving was alive and had chosen to be invisible, had watched everything happen from a distance, had engineered the night that changed everything and had never once surfaced to face what he had built.That was
CHASING THE WIFE HE FORCED TO DIVORCE CHAPTER EIGHTY FOUR: THE DEAD MAN'S ACCOUNT
"Victor Knight."Adrian stood up.Not dramatically, not the performance of a man reacting to a shock, the quiet precise movement of someone whose mind had just shifted into a different gear and whose body had followed without announcing it, and I watched him stand and understood that whatever was happening behind his eyes was more complicated than surprise."You knew."My voice came out quieter than I intended.He looked at me."Not this, not the account, not any of this specifically, but I knew something about my father's death didn't settle the way it should have.""What do you mean."He was quiet for a moment, choosing words with the carefulness he had been applying to everything since the building thirty floors above us, the carefulness of a man who had learned that imprecision cost things he couldn't afford to lose."When he died, the official account was a heart attack, I accepted that because Richard had as much as told me it was coming when he said Victor would discover very s
CHASING THE WIFE HE FORCED TO DIVORCE CHAPTER EIGHTY THREE: THE NAME
*I found the name.*I crossed the café in eight steps.Daniel looked up from his phone when I reached him, the expression on his face carrying something I had learned to read across one very long night and one very long day, the particular expression of someone who had found something significant and was already measuring the cost of delivering it."Tell me."He turned the phone toward me.A photograph on the screen, grainy, pulled from some internal database that wasn't supposed to be accessible to people like Daniel, a face I stared at for three full seconds before the recognition arrived, and when it arrived it didn't arrive gently, it arrived the way things arrived that had been sitting in plain sight the entire time and had simply been waiting for the right angle of light.I knew that face.Not well, not intimately, not the way you knew people who had been present in your life for years, but the particular way you knew faces that had appeared at significant moments and been filed
You May Also Like
ONLY YOU
Rosa Kane782.9K viewsLet Me Go, Mr. Hill!
Shallow South6.6M viewsMy Bestfriend's Brother Shouldn't Know How I Taste
Demiah13645.3K viewsRude Awakenings
Turquoise Grace1.1M viewsplease divorce me, Mr Ford
Eugene141 viewsHe Chose Her While I Was Dying, Then I Became an Heiress
Sero17 viewsMy Stepbrothers Dirty Little Secrets
Speedwriter242 viewsThe Penalty for Loving You
Picxie16 views
