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Chapter 49: The sixth Key
publish date:
2026-10-24 17:50:02
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The Billionaire's Substitute Bride. Chapter 85: The name of the real record
Price walked toward them through the smoke with the unhurried gait of a man crossing a lawn. His white coat was spotless, and the little black pistol hung loosely at his side, aimed at the floor tiles as though it were an afterthought. Behind him the firefighters had vanished around the corner with their hoses, and the corridor held only the roar of the flames and the wet hiss of steam."Dr. Price," Ava said. She rose to her feet and stepped in front of her mother, with the heart-shaped box clamped against her ribs. "You were arrested at the Blackwood Hotel and again at the hospital, and both times someone let you walk out.""A man in my profession learns to be useful to the people who hold the keys." He smiled gently. "I have been useful to nearly everyone, Mrs. Blackwood, and so nobody can afford to keep me.""Then you will understand if I do not hand you this.""I would not dream of asking you to." He stopped ten paces away. "I only want you to open it, because the lock responds to
The Billionaire's Substitute Bride. Chapter 84: the heart room
Ava was already running before the line finished going dead. She sprinted up the laundry stairs with her soaked boots slapping the concrete, and behind her she heard Thorne's heavier tread and Grant shouting for the others to follow. Liam called her name from somewhere below, rough and desperate, and she did not slow down."Do not bring anyone else," she said aloud, to nobody. "That is what she said.""Your mother is not the one making the rules this morning." Thorne caught up with her on the second landing and seized the rail beside her. "I will not leave you alone in a burning building, and you may argue with me after we are out.""Then keep up."They burst out of the stairwell into a lobby full of shouting. Nurses were pushing wheelchairs toward the doors, and a cluster of patients in gowns stood on the pavement outside with blankets over their shoulders. A fire engine was backing up to the entrance with its siren wailing, and above them, on the fourth floor, a column of thick blac
The Billionaire's Substitute Bride. Chapter 83: Don't worry about me.
"Mom, put it on speaker," Ava said. Her voice came out thin, and she turned the phone toward the circle of wet, silent faces. "Everyone is listening, and Clara is wearing a ring that says you ordered it.""I did." Nora's breath rattled faintly through the speaker, but her words were clear and measured, the voice of a bookkeeper reading a ledger aloud. "Eleven months ago, Theodore came to my bed with two papers. One was a donor agreement, and the other was an oath that Clara would swear to keep me alive.""The fourth key," Clara whispered."He told me that you had already agreed." A pause, and the soft hiss of an oxygen line. "I could not stop it, so I did the only thing that was left. I took what was in my savings, and I paid the society's jeweler to make a ring that would never harm you.""It is glowing," Clara said. Her voice cracked. "It is getting hotter, Mom.""That is the part that frightens people, and it is only a display." Nora's tone softened. "The jeweler told me that every
The Billionaire's Substitute Bride. Chapter 82: The founding page.
Catherine did not take the paper at first. She stood in the doorway of the laundry level with the gray light behind her and her hand still pressed against her mouth, and when she finally crossed the floor, she did it slowly, like a woman walking toward a window she was afraid to look through."That is my grandmother's handwriting," she said at last. "She signed every letter with a loop on the capital C, and she taught me to do it the same way when I was six years old.""Your grandmother?" Ava asked."Catherine Vale, the first of that name. Theodore's mother." Catherine lowered herself onto an overturned laundry cart and took the sodden page between both hands. "I was named for her, and so was Cecilia, though we never knew why Theodore went quiet whenever anyone mentioned it.""Then she is the chairman who was never found.""She is the chairman who was never looked for." Catherine bent over the ink, and her lips moved as she read. "Henry said that he built the Table as a trap, but the
The Billionaire's Substitute Bride. Chapter 81: The cistern gate
The water hit the long table like a fist. Candles went out in a hiss of steam, a hooded man was swept off his feet and slid screaming across the oak, and the whole circular chamber filled with the roar of a river that had been waiting fifty years to be let loose. Ava grabbed Liam's belt with one hand and the edge of the white chair with the other, and the cold climbed to her knees in the time it took her to breathe."The stair!" she shouted. "Where is the stair?""Behind the founder's chair!" Henry's voice carried over the flood, calm and almost cheerful. He had not moved from his place at the head of the table, and the water foamed around his gray suit like a stream around a stone. "It is a narrow iron spiral, and it takes about two minutes to climb if no one panics.""You could have said that before you opened the gate!""I could have done many things, my dear."Thorne had waded to the nearest hooded figure and hauled him upright by the collar. "Everyone to the far wall!" he bellowe
The Billionaire's Substitute Bride. Chapter 80: The ring in Liam's hand.
Ava did not look at Clara for more than a heartbeat. She made herself turn to the old man at the head of the table, because every instinct told her that the person she looked at longest would be the one who suffered for it."You told me that you were a prisoner," she said. "You held my wrist in a white room and said that Victor had locked you away for twelve years.""Victor did lock me away." Henry's voice was patient and warm. "He did it at my own request, on the night of the fire, because I needed a reason to vanish and a story that would make the Keyholders believe they had won.""You let your son bury an empty coffin.""I let him bury a coffin, and I have regretted it every day since." For the first time something moved behind his gray eyes, and it looked like honest grief. "But a boy who is certain that his father is dead will fight much harder than one who suspects otherwise, and I needed Liam to become the man who could end this.""You needed him." Ava's grip tightened on the s
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