로그인Chapter 263ElowenThe investigators arrived on a Thursday morning.I don't know what I had been expecting. Older, maybe. The kind of weathered, seen-it-all professionals who carried their experience in the lines around their eyes and moved through rooms like they already owned them. People who looked like they'd been handed impossible things before and had simply gotten on with it.What walked through the door instead were two people who looked barely past thirty, and something about that surprised me enough that I had to school my expression quickly so it didn't show.Kian noticed anyway. He always did. The corner of his mouth moved and he leaned slightly toward me as they settled into the chairs across from us."Don't let the age fool you," he said quietly.It didn't take long to understand what he meant.Declan Marsh was Kian's contact. British. Dark-haired, lean, with a quality of stillness about him that felt deliberate.The kind a person cultivates over years of learning that
Chapter 262Elowen Later that night, after dinner, I found Giuliana in her room arranging her stuffed animals in some complex pattern only she understood."Hey, baby," I said, knocking on the doorframe. "Can I come in?""Of course, Mama!" She looked up, brightening. "I'm organizing them by color family. Verde says it makes more sense than organizing by size.""Verde is very wise," I said, crossing the room and settling onto the edge of her bed, careful not to disturb the outer ring of the stuffed animal. "He always has been."She nodded with complete seriousness and went back to repositioning a small blue rabbit.I watched her for a moment, let out a slow breath and smoothed a hand over the blanket at the edge of her knee."Can I talk to you about something important?" I asked.Her expression shifted immediately. "Is the baby okay?""The baby's perfect. This is about something else."She set down the stuffed dragon she'd been holding and gave me her full attention. "What is it?"I to
Chapter 261Elowen"I know," I said quietly. "I never did."Matteo's hand moved gently on my shoulder, a silent question in the touch."There wasn't much to say," I continued. "I was left at the orphanage when I was a baby. No note. No name. No explanation. The nuns gave me a name, raised me, and that was it. End of story.""Except it wasn't," Kian said softly."No." I looked at him. "It wasn't. There's always been this... gap. This blank space where the beginning should be. And I learned not to ask about it. Not to think about it. Because what was the point? They were gone. I survived. Move on.""But you never really did," Matteo said."I tried." My voice came out smaller than I intended. "I really did try. I built a life. I got married, badly, but still. I moved forward. I told myself it didn't matter where I came from because I was making my own way.""And now?" Kian asked."Now I'm about to become a mother." I pressed my hand to my stomach, where our baby was growing. "And I keep
Chapter 260Elowen I held her gaze. "Yes.""Elowen." She said my name the way she did when she was trying to choose between ten different responses and couldn't land on one. "Your parents.""My biological parents. Yes.""The ones who left you at an orphanage.""I'm aware of what they did, Caroline."She exhaled through her nose. Looked away for a moment, at the fountain, at the pigeons, at some distant point past the flowering hedges, I could see her working through it. Trying to find the version of this conversation that helped me without feeding something that might hurt me."Why now?" she asked finally. Her voice had lost its edge. It was just careful now. Honest. "After everything, after all of it, why now?"I thought about it. Really thought about it, the way she'd asked me to do with the harder questions."Because I'm about to bring a child into the world," I said quietly. "And I don't know the first half of where I came from. I don't know what they looked like. I don't know
Chapter 259Elowen"That's the honest answer. I have no idea."The words came out quietly, but they landed with more weight than I expected. Like I'd been carrying them for a long time without realizing."For so long everything was about surviving him. Then it was about Giuliana's illness. Then it was about figuring out what I was to Matteo and Kian, what we were to each other." I shook my head slowly. "And now I have all of it. I have more than I ever dreamed of having. And when I try to look past it, past the family we're building, past the baby coming, I just…" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. "I don't know what I see."The confession sat between us, raw and a little clumsy. The kind of thing that sounds smaller out loud than it feels inside.Caroline didn't rush to fill it.She just looked at me, steady and patient, like she was giving me room to hear myself properly. "That's okay," she said quietly. "That's actually an incredibly honest and human thing to say. You don't hav
Chapter 258ElowenThe café was the kind of place you stumbled into by accident and never wanted to leave.It sat tucked at the end of a quiet side street, half-hidden behind a row of flowering hedges, with wrought iron chairs and little marble-topped tables that caught the morning light just right. A stone fountain gurgled softly at the center of the courtyard, and pigeons wandered between the legs of the empty chairs like they owned the place.Damien had excused himself the moment we sat down, something about wanting to find a bookshop he'd read about, though I suspected he simply knew that Caroline and I needed the space. He had that kind of quiet intelligence about him. He saw things without making a production of seeing them.I think that's why he can successfully own a company.We sat across from each other beneath a wide cream umbrella, our drinks between us — her coffee, my herbal tea. She was watching me stir my tea, and I could feel the shape of something building behind
Chapter 71ElowenSomething cool touched my forehead and I tried to open my eyes but they felt glued shut, my eyelids too heavy to lift and my head pounding with a rhythm that made even thinking painful.The cool sensation moved to my temples and I realized someone was dabbing at my hair with what
Chapter 75Elowen But he was also the only option I had, I had no one else.It was a terrible idea.It was probably going to backfire.It was likely going to make everything worse instead of better.But I was done playing by Adrian's rules, done accepting that I had no choices, done letting fear o
Chapter 56Matteo"We're doing this for our twisted desires, our pleasures," Elowen said, and there was something hard in her voice, something brittle that hadn't been there before. "It's just sex and I'll make sure I have the best of it these few days remaining. So let's skip the questions becaus
Chapter 65Matteo "Facciamo una pausa, sì?" I suggested, wheeling her toward a shaded area. Let's take a break, yes? "You've been going strong for hours, principessa, even healthy children would be tired by now.""Ma non voglio fermarmi," " But I don't want to stop." she protested, but I could hea







