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Chapter Twenty-Seven:
publish date:
2026-07-04 23:14:17
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OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Twenty-Seven:
I wake up before Alexander again. This is becoming a pattern. He sleeps later now than he did when I first moved in. Back then he was always awake before dawn, working in his office or on the phone with Marcus or standing at the kitchen counter with coffee and the weight of an empire on his shoulders. Now he sleeps until the light comes through the windows. Until I move beside him or get up to make coffee or just lie there watching him breathe.I think he sleeps better because I am here. I do not ask him if this is true. I just notice it the way I notice everything about him now.I get out of bed carefully so I do not wake him. The flip phone is still on his nightstand where he set it last night. Small. Old. The kind of phone no one uses anymore unless they are trying to stay hidden. I look at it for a long moment. One call. That is all it would take. One call and Alexander would hear his father's voice for the first time in thirty-five years.But he said not tonight. And I understand
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Twenty-Six:
I am still staring at the space where James Carver disappeared when I feel Alexander's hand loosen on mine. Not letting go. Just easing the grip that was starting to cut off circulation. I look at him. His face is unreadable in the way it gets when he is processing something too large to show in a room full of people who are watching."Are you okay?" I ask."No."The honesty catches me off guard. Not because he does not tell me the truth. He does. Always. But because he just said it out loud in a ballroom full of two hundred people who would use that admission against him if they heard it."Do you want to leave?" I ask."No. We stay. We do exactly what we came here to do.""Which is what?"He looks at me. Really looks at me. And I see something in his face I have not seen before. Not the fourth register. Not the stillness I have catalogued over the past months. Something new. Something that looks almost like relief."We show up exactly as we are," he says. "That is what you told me th
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Twenty-Five:
James Carver does not look surprised when we approach. He looks like he has been waiting. Like he knew exactly when we would arrive and exactly when we would cross the room to him. He sets his champagne glass on the tray of a passing server and turns to face us fully."Mr. Kane," he says. His voice is quiet. Measured. The voice of someone who has spent a lifetime saying only what needs to be said. "Miss Bennett. I wondered how long it would take you to find me.""You made it easy," Alexander says. "You wanted to be found.""Yes. I did."I study him up close. He is older than I thought when I saw him at the gallery. Mid-seventies maybe. But he moves like someone younger. There is a stillness to him that reminds me of Alexander. Not the same kind. But from the same place. The stillness of someone who learned early that movement draws attention and attention can be dangerous."Is my father alive?" Alexander asks. No preamble. No buildup. Just the question that has been sitting between us
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Twenty-Four:
I stand in the closet looking at the dresses Alexander has chosen for events like this. The gala. The one that is happening tonight. The one he lied about the timing of because he thought I needed protecting from my own anxiety.He was right. I would have spent two days bracing for this if I had known. Instead I spent last night sleeping next to him and this morning drinking coffee and telling him it does not matter how we got here. It only matters what we do now.I believe that. I have to believe that. Because if I start questioning whether the bar was planned or whether someone decided I was going to matter to Alexander before I decided it myself, I will spiral into a version of myself I do not want to be anymore. The version that second-guesses everything. That assumes every good thing is a trick waiting to fall apart.I pull a dress from the rack. Dark green. Simple lines. The kind of thing that will photograph well but will not make me feel like I am wearing a costume. I have bee
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Twenty-Three:
I wake before Sophia. The room is still dark, but the city outside is beginning to lighten at the edges. Dawn is an hour away. I have been awake for longer than that. Lying still so I do not wake her. Thinking about the letter in my desk drawer and the man who wrote the final page.James Carver. I have not thought about that name in thirty years. My father mentioned him exactly three times that I can remember. Once when I was eight and asked why we never had visitors. Once when I was ten, I found a photograph in my father's desk of two men standing in front of a building I did not recognize. Once when I was twelve and my father told me that if anything ever happened to him, if he ever had to leave and could not come back, I should remember that some people disappear because staying would hurt the people they love more than leaving ever could.I did not understand what he meant at the time. I thought he was being dramatic. Parents did not just disappear. They stayed. They worked. They
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Twenty-Two:
I am still holding the letter when I ask the question that has been forming since Alexander handed it to me."If James Carver has been watching me for two years," I say slowly, "and your father has been aware of me before the contract, then what does that mean about the contract itself?"Alexander does not answer immediately. I watch him turn the question over the way he turns everything over. Precisely. Carefully. Looking for the edges that might cut if handled wrong. He is sitting across from me in his office chair, still in the suit he wore to my gallery show. My gallery show was interrupted by a ghost from his past who has apparently been watching me longer than Alexander has known me."It means," he says finally, "that someone knew we were going to meet before either of us did."I set the letter down on the desk between us. My hands are steady, but it takes effort to keep them that way. I am processing. Not panicking. Just taking in information and filing it the way I have always
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Two:
The penthouse is silent. I stand in the entrance hall with my suitcase at my feet and Alexander three steps behind me, and I try to catalogue what I am seeing. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Grey walls. Charcoal furniture. Everything clean and expensive and impersonal except for a single photograph on t
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Fifteen:
"I do not want to talk about Hartwell, or Derek, or any of it. Not today. Today I want to show you something."Sophia says this to Alexander the morning after Marcus's call about the two-year investigation. They are at the kitchen counter. He is reading something on his phone. She is watching him.
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Three:
I wake to sun streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows and have no idea what time it is. I reach for my phone. Ten thirty. I have not slept past eight in years. I sit up and look around the room. My room. In Alexander Kane's penthouse. This is real. This is actually happening.I get out of be
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter One:
"Miss Bennett," he says. "Mr. Kane is waiting for confirmation."I look at the contract. One year. Total compliance. My body, my time, my obedience written out in clean legal language that makes it sound reasonable. The clock on Alexander Kane's kitchen wall reads 2:17 a.m., and I have been sitting
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