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Chapter Eighty Five
Date de publication:
2026-11-10 01:01:27Travis
The Belgravia townhouse looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain, and I stood on its pavement at ten o’clock at night with a leather folder under my arm and a patience that I had not felt in weeks.
Hale had telephoned from a hospital corridor an hour earlier, his voice thin with pain and fury. A man dressed as a priest had come out of the shadows beside the confessional in Peckham, and he had fired two shots before Hale could draw his own weapon. One of them
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The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty Five
TravisThe Belgravia townhouse looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain, and I stood on its pavement at ten o’clock at night with a leather folder under my arm and a patience that I had not felt in weeks.Hale had telephoned from a hospital corridor an hour earlier, his voice thin with pain and fury. A man dressed as a priest had come out of the shadows beside the confessional in Peckham, and he had fired two shots before Hale could draw his own weapon. One of them had grazed Hale’s ribs, and the other had shattered a stained glass saint, and in the confusion the girl Mara had been dragged through a side door into a waiting van. Hale had survived and had memorised the number plate, and he had said in a low flat voice that every thread in this affair seemed to end in a hand that wore the same silver falcon.I had not answered him with anything useful. I had simply put down the telephone and walked out of the study, because there was one knot in
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty Four
HaleMara Okonkwo-Reyes was kneeling at the back of a small Catholic church in Peckham when Dorian Hale found her, and she was weeping so quietly that he thought at first she was only breathing.He had followed the trail for three days through a maze of dead ends and false addresses. The flat above the launderette had been abandoned, the landlord swearing that the girl had left a month’s rent in an envelope and vanished. A friend at the sandwich shop had mentioned that she lit candles at a church two streets away, and he had arrived at dusk with his collar turned up and his heart sinking. The metadata on the forged drive had led him through four layers of anonymous servers to a laptop registered to her student account, and he had understood that the girl was either a master criminal or a very frightened child.The church was nearly empty, a long dim nave smelling of wax and damp wool, with a single priest murmuring beside a confessional. Mara knelt in the
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty Three
TravisI doubled her guards on the morning after the library, and I did it without speaking to her, which was the first of the cowardices that I committed that week.Hale delivered the order to the Ashbourne house at nine o’clock, standing in a hall of black and white marble with his hat in his hands. He had returned from Wimpole Street with a face like old paper, and he reported what he had found in the ravaged clinic in the stiff voice of a soldier giving evidence at a court martial. Six of my best men took up positions around the terrace, and four more settled into a van at the end of the lane, and I watched the whole operation from the back of a car with the engine switched off.I did not go in. I had meant to, and I had rehearsed the apology for six hours in the study at three in the morning, and my feet had refused to carry me across the pavement. A curtain had moved in an upstairs window, and a pale shape had stood behind the glass for a long
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty Two
PuertoI learned that Isabella was pregnant three days before I learned that the camera in my storage unit had been watching me discover it, and I have never decided which fact frightened me more.The woman in the grey coat had told me to tell no one, and for once I had obeyed her. I pulled the lead from the camera and stamped the lens into the concrete beneath my heel, and I stood among the photographs breathing like a man who had run a mile. Then I went home to the flat in Clerkenwell and sat in the dark with a glass of water, and I let the knowledge settle through me until it found the bottom.It did not make me angry, and that was what astonished me. I had expected jealousy, or the old hot humiliation of the gala, and instead there came a stillness so complete that I could hear the refrigerator humming in the next room. Eliana’s slip arrived the next afternoon, tossed out in the middle of a quarrel about the cost of a christening gown. She had said tha
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty One
KarinaI learned of the child in a hotel bathroom, from a woman who was supposed to be incapable of surprising me.Desire had telephoned at six in the morning, and she had spoken in the clipped monotone of someone reading a casualty list. She told me that the Chairman’s people had stripped a clinic on Wimpole Street during the night, that the wife was nine weeks gone and thriving, and that the husband had been told at midnight in a library in Kensington. I sat on the edge of the marble bath with the telephone against my ear and the taps running to cover my breathing, and I felt two opposite things arrive in me so close together that I could not separate them.The first was horror, because I knew what a child meant to a man like the Chairman. The second was a cold bright thread of calculation that I despised myself for recognising, and I followed it as a sleepwalker follows a corridor.A child complicated everything, and complications were the only s
The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back Chapter Eighty
IsabellaI wept into Scott’s jumper until the wool was damp from collar to cuff, and he never once told me that he had warned me.He did not warn me, and he did not say a word of comfort that sounded rehearsed. He sat beside me on the library sofa with one arm around my shoulders and the other resting on the cushion beside my knee, and he let me shake until the storm in me wore itself thin. The fire burned down to a bed of red coals, and the clock in the hall chimed two and then three, and the light of the single lamp made a warm island in the vast dark room.Travis had been gone for nearly an hour, and I had not moved from the place where he left me. I had heard the front door close and the car engine fail to start, and then I had heard nothing at all, and the silence afterward had pressed against my ears like water. A part of me had listened for his footsteps returning along the terrace, and another part had prayed that they would not, and I had hated bo
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