INICIAR SESIÓNHazel Skai didn’t marry into the powerful Varyn family for love. She married to survive… and to find the mother who abandoned her. But one year later, her marriage to Kaden Varyn is nothing but silence and cold distance. No heir. No affection. And no sign that things will ever change. Desperate and cornered, Hazel makes a reckless decision at the Varyn family ball. In the dark of a stranger’s room, she finally gives in to the one thing her husband has never given her. The next morning, she sees the truth. The man she spent the night with has a dragon tattoo across his chest. Kaden Varyn hates tattoos. Which means the man in her bed was never her husband. Nikolai Varyn left Sky Shade City years ago, carrying nothing but grief and a promise to a woman who died too soon. He returned only to settle unfinished business—not to get involved with anyone. Especially not his brother’s wife. But Hazel Skai was never supposed to matter to him. Now she’s under his skin in ways he can’t ignore. And the most dangerous part? Hazel might not want him to stop.
Ver másChapter 119SEALEDPOV: NikolaiThe Law Society archive was in a basement too.A different basement, climate controlled, the kind of facility that took the preservation of paper seriously rather than as an afterthought, and the woman who met us there had been told the broad shape of why a forty year old box from a dissolved chambers had become significant and was treating the whole thing with appropriate gravity.The box was on a table in a small viewing room.Plain. Sealed with tape that had gone brittle with age. The note on the outside in handwriting that was not Margaret's, which meant a solicitor or clerk had written the receipt instructions after she sent it.Open when the time is right.And you will know when that is.I looked at it for a long moment.Hazel was beside me. Kaden on my other side. The two investigators standing slightly back, giving us the room the way they had given us the room at every significant moment in this investigation, understanding that some things nee
Chapter 119SEALEDPOV: NikolaiThe Law Society archive was in a basement too.A different basement, climate controlled, the kind of facility that took the preservation of paper seriously rather than as an afterthought, and the woman who met us there had been told the broad shape of why a forty year old box from a dissolved chambers had become significant and was treating the whole thing with appropriate gravity.The box was on a table in a small viewing room.Plain. Sealed with tape that had gone brittle with age. The note on the outside in handwriting that was not Margaret's, which meant a solicitor or clerk had written the receipt instructions after she sent it.Open when the time is right.And you will know when that is.I looked at it for a long moment.Hazel was beside me. Kaden on my other side. The two investigators standing slightly back, giving us the room the way they had given us the room at every significant moment in this investigation, understanding that some things nee
Chapter 118FIVEPOV: HazelKaden said it and the kitchen went quiet.Not dramatically. Just the specific pause that happened when something arrived that required everyone in the room to set down what they were doing and look at it.My father put his coffee cup down.My mother stopped at the counter.Iris looked around at the change in the room and decided it did not concern her and went back to whatever she had in her hand.I looked at Nikolai.He looked at Kaden."A fifth copy," Nikolai said."The solicitor's records," Kaden said. "The investigators went through everything this morning. They found a payment. Dated nineteen eighty three. From Margaret to a courier service." He paused. "The courier service no longer exists but the investigators traced the records through the company's dissolution filing. The delivery address is in the city.""What address," I said.He told me.I looked at Nikolai.He looked at me."That is the university," I said."Yes," Kaden said. "The records depar
Chapter 117GENEVAPOV: HazelHer name was Dr Claire Osei.She was fifty three and she had flown overnight from Geneva with two clinic directors and a folder of twenty years of research and she was sitting in the estate library at eleven in the morning with the specific energy of someone who had been waiting to be in exactly this room and was not going to waste the time now that she was in it.She looked at the folder of Margaret's documentation on the table.She had not touched it yet.She was looking at it the way you looked at something you had been approaching from a long way away."Rajan Anand told me about a compound," she said. "In a conference in nineteen ninety four. He was already ill by then and he knew it and he was trying to get the information out before he could not." She looked at her hands. "He said he had found something on a mountain with a colleague who was no longer alive. He said the colleague had found the secondary application first and had documented it but th
ELENAPOV: NikolaiI had built a version of this moment in my head for two years.Not consciously. Not as a plan. But grief does that, it constructs the conversations you never got to have and runs them on repeat until you cannot tell anymore whether you are remembering something or imagining it. I
LENAPOV: HazelI called her from the car.Kaden was driving and Nikolai was in the passenger seat and I was in the back with my phone pressed to my ear and the city moving past the windows and the question Kaden had asked in the entrance hall still sitting in my chest like something I had swallowe
SAY ITPOV: NikolaiShe looked at me from the doorway.The room was quiet and the morning was still sitting in the air between us, all of it, the meeting and Scott's face and the photograph on the table and the phone call with her mother and everything that had been said and decided in the last thr
SABLE POV: Nikolai I left the meeting room at nine twenty two. Not because it was over. It was not over. Kaden was still talking, laying out the financial chain with the methodical patience of a man who had rehearsed it for three years, and Vera was sitting at the end of the table with her hands






Welcome to GoodNovel world of fiction. If you like this novel, or you are an idealist hoping to explore a perfect world, and also want to become an original novel author online to increase income, you can join our family to read or create various types of books, such as romance novel, epic reading, werewolf novel, fantasy novel, history novel and so on. If you are a reader, high quality novels can be selected here. If you are an author, you can obtain more inspiration from others to create more brilliant works, what's more, your works on our platform will catch more attention and win more admiration from readers.