LOGINVivienne Duarte had spent her youth supporting her husband, pouring all her time and dreams into his ambitions. Married for years and neglecting her own life and career, she believed everything would be fine as long as she remained the dutiful wife. But she was wrong. She wasn’t enough. When Vivienne discovered her husband, Marco, was cheating on her with his first love, the same woman who had once left him for another man, her world shattered. And when she confronted him, Marco didn’t even deny it; instead, he coldly suggested a divorce, breaking her heart into a thousand pieces. Devastated and numb, Vivienne drowned her sorrows at a bar, where a single reckless night led her into the arms of a stranger. And by morning, she vanished without a trace. Five years later, she returned no longer the fragile woman she once was, but a brilliant, mysterious doctor with a new name and a heart hardened by betrayal. She came back for revenge. Yet fate dealt her a cruel twist, because the stranger from that night turned out to be Marco’s uncle… the very man who had been searching for her ever since. Now, Vivienne vows to stay away from him at all costs, for she has something that belongs to him, something he must never find out. But her plans spiral into chaos when Marco reappears, claiming the same thing as his own. Can Vivienne outsmart them both in this dangerous game of love, power, and vengeance, or will she become the pawn in their deadly game of chess?
View More~ Lorenzo's POVI have planned very few things in my life with joy.Planning, in my experience, had always been a function of necessity rather than pleasure, the cold and structural work of someone who understood that outcomes required architecture and that architecture required precision and that precision left no room for the kind of looseness that joy introduced. I had planned business manoeuvres and legal strategies and the slow dismantling of family empires, and I had done all of it with the focused detachment of a man who understood that emotional investment in a plan was a liability rather than an asset.Planning the wedding was different.I noticed this about myself with the slightly bemused quality of a man encountering a version of himself he had not previously had occasion to meet. I sat across from Vivienne in my apartment three days after the car park with a notepad between us that had been her idea and which I had initially regarded as unnecessary, and I found myself wit
~ Lorenzo's POVShe looked at the ring on her finger for a long moment before she looked at me.I watched her do it. I had time, because she was not a woman who moved through significant moments without examining them, and I had learned that about her early and had stopped trying to rush her through the processing of things she needed to process. The ring sat on her finger in the pale afternoon light, a simple and substantial thing, not decorative in the excessive way that rings sometimes were, just a diamond of particular quality in a setting that I had chosen because it looked like something she might have chosen herself, clean-lined and without performance.Her face was doing several things at once.I could read most of them. The joy was present and clear, the specific brightness of it in her eyes that she was making no effort to contain, which was itself significant because Vivienne's default was containment and the absence of it meant something. But underneath the joy there was s
~ Vivienne's POVI stared at him."Marco," I said."Yes.""Marco killed Richard Blackwell.""Yes."I turned the information over in my mind the way you turned something fragile over, carefully and with the awareness that its full weight had not yet been felt. Marco, who had stood in that meeting room doorway with his prepared voice and his selected witnesses and his finger pointing at Lorenzo with the performance of a man who had arrived to discover something rather than a man who had arranged it. Marco, who had accused Lorenzo in a room that he had already been inside before Lorenzo arrived. Marco, whose motive I could construct in my sleep, the inheritance, the board, the slow and inexorable movement of the Blackwell group's power in a direction that was not his."How did you find out?" I asked.Lorenzo looked at me with the particular patience of someone waiting for a question to catch up with its own answer."Lorenzo.""Who do you think I am, Vivienne?" he said, not unkindly.I he
~ Vivienne's POVI stared at him."Marco," I said."Yes.""Marco killed Richard Blackwell.""Yes."I turned the information over in my mind the way you turned something fragile over, carefully and with the awareness that its full weight had not yet been felt. Marco, who had stood in that meeting room doorway with his prepared voice and his selected witnesses and his finger pointing at Lorenzo with the performance of a man who had arrived to discover something rather than a man who had arranged it. Marco, who had accused Lorenzo in a room that he had already been inside before Lorenzo arrived. Marco, whose motive I could construct in my sleep, the inheritance, the board, the slow and inexorable movement of the Blackwell group's power in a direction that was not his."How did you find out?" I asked.Lorenzo looked at me with the particular patience of someone waiting for a question to catch up with its own answer."Lorenzo.""Who do you think I am, Vivienne?" he said, not unkindly.I he
~ Vivienne's POVLorenzo took me to the small private waiting area at the end of the corridor outside the lab, a room that existed for exactly this kind of purpose, beige walls and upholstered chairs and a window that looked out onto the side of another building. I had walked past it hundreds of ti
~ Lorenzo's POVI stared at the ceiling of my bedroom, watching the shadows shift as dawn broke through the curtains. Another sleepless night. Another night spent thinking about her.Vivienne.Her name echoed in my mind like a prayer, like a curse, like something I couldn't escape no matter how har
~ Vivienne's POVFear consumed me entirely as I pressed harder on the accelerator, my car weaving through traffic at speeds that would have terrified me under normal circumstances. But these weren't normal circumstances. My son was in the hospital. My baby had collapsed. Nothing else mattered.The
~ Lorenzo's POVThe penthouse felt emptier than it ever had before.I stood in the exact spot where I'd watched Vivienne disappear into the elevator, my feet seemingly rooted to the marble floor. The doors had closed minutes ago—or maybe hours, time had lost all meaning—but I couldn't move.She was
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