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Chapter Forty-One: The Search
publish date:
2026-07-15 15:41:33
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Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Forty-Four: Pax Responds
The person sitting in the Cross Corporation building in the city was dealt with by ten in the morning.Valour left at seven forty-five. He came back at eleven with the specific expression he wore when something significant had been concluded and he had decided the conclusion was correct. He went directly to Damien's study. The door closed. Twenty minutes later it opened and both of them came out and the estate shifted in atmosphere — the particular change that happened when the weight of something urgent had been lifted and replaced with the weight of something that now needed to be built.Isolde was already working on the legal filing.I went to my studio and sat at my desk.Found myself instead looking at the sketchbook that had started all of this — the one Damien had moved to the library table and placed open to the portrait page, the one that had changed the shape of everything in this house. The sketchbook that had been a hiding place and then a communication and then something
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Forty-Three: What's on the Drive
"They know," Damien repeated.He said it quietly, looking at the road ahead, filing it rather than reacting to it."Who is the contact," I said. "The one inside Cross Corporation.""Dorn doesn't have a name yet," Valour said. "Just the message and the timestamp. He's working on the number.""How long," Damien said."An hour. Maybe less if the number is traceable."In the back seat Lyra was very still. I could feel her stillness — the specific quality of someone calculating the cost of both options."Lyra," I said.She looked at me."Do you know who the contact is," I said. "Inside Cross Corporation."A pause."I saw a name," she said carefully. "In the files. I didn't have the context to understand whether it was relevant. I didn't put it on the drive." She paused. "But I remembered it. Every detail I saw in those files, I memorised. Because I understood they were the only thing I had.""What name," Damien said.She told him.Valour went very still in the front seat.Damien said nothi
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Forty-Two: Northern Coast
"How far behind us is he," Damien said.Valour was already on his phone. "The car left twenty minutes before we did. If he's returning directly, we have fifteen minutes at the property before he arrives. Possibly less.""He drives fast," Damien said.I sat in the passenger seat and watched the coastal road unwind in the headlights and thought about fifteen minutes.Fifteen minutes to get in, find Lyra, get out.Lyra who had been surviving in a stone building for weeks. Who had called me from the next room with Pax twenty feet away. Who had packed a bag and been ready for four days.She would be ready. That was what I held onto during the forty-three minutes of dark road. Not the plan. Not the timeline. Just the specific certainty that my sister, whatever else she was and whatever she had done, was not someone who waited without preparing.The property appeared at the end of a narrow coastal road — a converted farmhouse, old stone, set back from the cliff edge. Lights in two windows. O
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Forty-One: The Search
"Alright," I had said.And then Damien had nodded and we had stood in his study with the weight of what came next sitting between us, and then he had said Valour was already moving and I should try to sleep, and I had gone back to my room and lain in the dark until four in the morning listening to the estate do the specific things it did when people were moving through it with purpose.At four the baby moved. Twice. Definite and unhurried, like someone reminding me they were there regardless of what else was happening in the house.I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and lay still and listened to the corridors and thought about Lyra in a stone building forty minutes north with a man in the next room.By morning, three things had happened that I wasn't told about directly but understood from the specific quality of the activity below my studio window.Dorn had been called back to the city to use his professional network — property records, business registration cross-references,
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Forty: Lyra's Fear
"Lyra," I said. "Where are you."Not a greeting. The only thing that mattered in the first five seconds was location, because Pax's voice was in the background and she had called me anyway and both of those things together meant the window for this conversation was very small."I can't say." Her voice was low. Careful. The voice of someone speaking at a specific volume for a specific reason. "He's in the next room. I have maybe five minutes."Vesna looked at me from across the desk. I put the phone on speaker, low volume, and held it between us."Tell me what's happening," I said."I don't know where to start.""Start with what's wrong. Right now. Today."The pause of someone who has been holding something for weeks and is deciding how much they can say in five minutes with a man in the next room."I saw things," she said. "In his files. Paper ones, in a case he keeps locked. I found the key two months ago." She stopped. "Nova. The things I saw. They weren't about you or the arrangeme
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Thirty-Nine: Lyra Was Never Safe
"Someone in this house already knew we were looking."Damien called Valour immediately. Two words and a number, standing in the middle of my studio with his phone already at his ear. Isolde closed her laptop, said she needed to go, and left with the quiet urgency of a woman who understood the next few hours required different tools than the ones she had brought.I sat in the studio after they left and looked at the timeline still spread across my table.The insider.Someone had run a search on Pax Rancour's name in the Cross Corporation internal system at six forty-five this morning. Before any of us had said his name. Before Isolde arrived with her records. Before this morning's session in this room had begun.Which meant one of two things.Either someone had been tipped off that we were investigating Pax specifically — which required access to our conversations, or to Dorn's research, or to Valour's overnight database pull.Or they had been watching the system independently, had alr
Faking his wife, carrying his child. CHAPTER SIX: THREE MONTHS AND COUNTING
I put the photograph back exactly where I found it.Slid it between the same pages. Pushed the book back into its gap on the shelf. Stood back and made sure nothing looked disturbed.Then I sat in one of the chairs by the window and pressed both hands flat against my stomach and did the arithmetic
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Five: The Attorney Who Sees Too Much
"Shall we?"Isolde didn't wait for my answer.She turned and walked and I followed because standing in that dining room with Damien's last sentence still hanging in the air behind me was not something I could do for another second. The scar comment. The wrist. The way he'd said it without looking u
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Four: Breakfast With a Man Who Counts Everything
He was already at the table.I stopped in the dining room doorway and took that in for a second. Damien Cross, the morning after his own wedding, sitting at the head of a table built for twenty, with a newspaper open and a cup of black coffee beside him like this was any other Tuesday. No celebrati
Faking his wife, carrying his child. Chapter Three: The House That Watches You Back
"Mrs. Cross."I turned.A woman stood at the end of the entrance hall, hands folded, spine straight, wearing a grey dress that matched the stone walls behind her so well she might have been part of the house itself. Mid-fifties. Silver hair pulled back without a single strand out of place. A face t
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