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Chapter 22
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2026-09-15 14:33:44
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The Bride They chased Away 40
Chapter 40: A Single Signature—Sign it, little sister. You've done it before.Serena's voice came through Lila's phone at 2:14 that afternoon, calm as if she were talking on any ordinary Sunday, from a number that didn't exist. In the background, there was a faint but unmistakable sound: the deep drone of jet engines starting up.By then, Damien had been unconscious for forty minutes.It had all happened too fast. One second he'd been standing in the courthouse hallway, one hand against the wall, saying something about the floor. The next, he was lying on the marble floor, his head in Lila's lap, his lips turning blue. Dana was kneeling beside him, two fingers digging into his neck, her round face contorted with fear."The pulse is slow," he had said. "Thirty-eight. And you can barely feel it."—What does that mean?"It means his heart is slowing down." Dana yanked open her purse. "It means we don't have time to argue. Marcus!"Marcus was already moving. With Kai's help and using his
The Bride They chased Away Chapter 39
Chapter 39: The Oath"Mr. Voss, are you all right?"Judge Moss asked it from the bench, quietly, over the roar of the gallery. He'd stopped hammering the gavel. He was looking past the chaos at the first row, at the tall man standing half out of his seat with one hand braced on the wood in front of him and a spreading brown stain at his feet.The noise thinned. Reporters turned. Heads swiveled.Damien lifted his eyes. They were gray and wide and not quite focused."I'm," he began.He stopped.It wasn't a long pause. Half a second. Maybe less. But Lila, standing in the witness box with a contract still in her hands, felt it hit her like a missed stair."I'm perfectly well, Your Honor," he said. The words came out a beat too slow, each one a little too careful, as though he were carrying them across a floor of loose stones. "A cup. I dropped a cup. I apologize to the court.""Mr. Voss." The judge's brow creased. "You look unwell.""It's the heat.""The courtroom is sixty-eight degrees."
The Bride They chased Away Chapter 38
Chapter 38: Cross-Examination"Dr. Ward, how long have you been engaged to the plaintiff?"Victoria asked it without looking up from her notes. She stood at the lectern with one hand resting on a legal pad and her voice pitched so low and even that the question seemed to slide into the room rather than land in it.Dr. Julian Ward, back on the witness stand, blinked.It was only half a second. His mouth stayed relaxed. His hands stayed folded. But Lila, watching from the defense table, saw the muscle at the corner of his jaw tick once, like a pulse in a wire.Twenty minutes earlier, the courtroom had come apart.Hobbs had said she's wearing white, and for three full seconds nobody had moved. Then Vance had shot to his feet bellowing objections, and half the gallery had leapt up with him, and Judge Moss had cracked his gavel until the walnut handle splintered. It had taken the bailiff and two deputies to restore order. When the noise finally dropped, Serena was still sitting exactly as
The Bride They chased Away Chapter 37
Chapter 37: The Hearing"In the matter of Voss versus Hart, this court will decide whether this marriage was ever real."Judge Harlan Moss said it into a microphone that squealed once and went quiet. He was a heavy man in his late sixties with a white mustache and half-moon glasses, and a voice like a door closing in a very old house. He didn't look at the crowd. He looked at the file in front of him, turned a page, and waited for the last cough in the room to die.It took a long time.Courtroom 4B was packed to the walls. Reporters filled the back three rows, pens poised over notebooks. Behind them stood a line of people who hadn't found seats, shoulder to shoulder against the paneling. Outside, on the courthouse steps, a hundred more waited under umbrellas. Lila had walked through them at 8:40 that morning with Damien's hand locked around hers and Marcus's men cutting a path. Cameras had flashed in her face like lightning. Someone had shouted, Mrs. Voss, are you a fraud?She'd kept
The Bride They chased Away Chapter 36
Chapter 36: The Briefcase"I have a photo of your husband handing a dead man a briefcase, and a U.S. Attorney who wants a warrant by Friday."Reyes said it in the fourth-floor corridor at twenty to six in the morning, with a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a manila envelope in the other. She said it the way she said everything. Flat. Tired. Without any decoration at all.Lila stood in front of her in a borrowed set of scrubs and a pair of Dana's sneakers, one size too big. Her hair was tied back with a rubber band. Her eyes felt like sandpaper.Forty minutes ago she'd been certain the worst thing that could happen that night had already happened.It had gone almost the way Ward wanted. He'd stood in the doorway of her mother's room with his transfer order, his kind face, and his two silent guards, and he'd waited for Lila to break. And she'd almost broken. She'd felt it in her knees.Then her mother had pushed herself up on one elbow, tubes pulling at her arm, and said in a voice
The Bride They chased Away Chapter 35
Chapter 35: Mother, Awake"Lila? Baby, why are you crying? Who died?"The voice was a thread. Dry, cracked, barely louder than the hum of the monitor beside the bed. But it was her mother's voice. Not the flat, cold one from the phone. This one had a little rasp in it and a crooked tilt at the end, the way it always did when she was teasing.Lila had waited three years to hear it.She was sitting in a vinyl chair beside the hospital bed with a battered sketchbook open on her lap and a pencil stuck behind her ear. She'd been there since dusk. It was a little after one in the morning now, and the corridor outside was dim and silent except for the squeak of a cart somewhere far away.She dropped the pencil. It rolled under the bed."Mom," she whispered.Her mother's eyes were open. They were hazel, ringed with gray, a little cloudy but clear enough to focus. They moved over Lila's face slowly, as if checking each feature against a memory. Her lips were chapped. Her hair, which had once b
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