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Chapter 66: Fueling Julian's Obsession
Fecha de publicación:
2026-11-05 17:13:50
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THE HEIRESS BEHIND THE MADNESS Chapter 70: Devotion in the Dark
KaelI don't remember crossing the hall.One moment I was standing at the front door with my father's watch ticking against my palm and the porter hovering at my elbow. The next I was sitting on the edge of Wren's bed with the box on my knees and her hand wrapped around the back of my neck, steering me gently, the way you'd steer someone out of smoke."Breathe," she said."I am.""You're not. Count with me."Four in, four out. It was my own technique, the one I gave to frightened patients, and she used it on me without a flicker of irony. That undid me more than the watch had.Twenty years. My mother had described that watch to every police clerk in London. Rose gold, cracked crystal, a little dent in the strap where he'd caught it on a door. They'd smiled at her kindly and told her it was probably in the river. And all that time it had been lying in a drawer on Upper Brook Street, and a woman in pearls had been winding it."She wants to see me walk into that ballroom shaking," I said
THE HEIRESS BEHIND THE MADNESS Chapter 69: The Eve of the Gala
WrenJulian's hand came out of his jacket holding his phone.I let my breath go so slowly that nobody saw it. He stared at the screen as if someone else had put it in his fingers. Then he looked at me, and I watched him do the one thing I'd been counting on since the day I married him.He chose the version that hurt less."She's lying," he said, and his voice steadied as he heard himself. "Look at her. She's been caught with her hand in my accounts and she's throwing mud at the only person who ever bothered to sit with her." He turned his hazel eyes on Lyra, and they had gone cold and flat. "Wren hasn't strung two sentences together in months."I tipped my head toward the chandelier. "The clocks are so loud in this house," I murmured. "Does nobody else hear them?"Lyra made a sound like something tearing. Beatrix's gaze rested on me a beat too long. I held the vacant smile, held it until my cheeks ached, and finally my grandmother lifted two fingers from the table."Sit down, Julian.
THE HEIRESS BEHIND THE MADNESS Chapter 68: The Fractured Alliance
Wren"I don't know whose watch you mean, Your Grace."Kael said it evenly. Only I could feel what it cost him. His knee had gone rigid against mine, and under the tablecloth his fingers closed around my wrist. He wasn't holding me. He was bracing himself against the only solid thing in a room that had begun to tilt.Beatrix didn't blink. "Rose gold. Cracked crystal. Stopped at eleven forty-two." She lowered herself into the chair beside Oswin as if it had been carried in for her. "Alaric wore it the night he died. It was never found. I have often wondered who took it off him."His pulse jumped under my thumb. I turned my hand over beneath the cloth and laced my fingers through his. Three weeks ago, in the dark, he'd told me his mother spent twenty years asking about that watch. I had said nothing then. I had only held him until his shoulders stopped shaking, and I held him now, with one hand, while the other lifted my wine glass as though I were a woman with no idea what was happening
THE HEIRESS BEHIND THE MADNESS Chapter 67: The Seduction Play
WrenOswin never answered the question.He only lifted his cane an inch off the floor, set it down again, and said, "Julian, you're overwrought. Have your housekeeper bring tea. We'll discuss it at dinner, like civilised people." Then he walked out past all of us, unhurried, and the door clicked behind him. Julian stood there with Lyra's phone in his fist and his mouth working around words that wouldn't come.By seven that evening, I understood why Oswin had called it dinner. It was a leash. He wanted every one of us at that table, watching one another.So I dressed for it.The gown had hung in the back of my wardrobe since before the Cotswolds, since before Julian was anything but a smiling man at a charity auction. Midnight silk, bare across the shoulders, cut low at the spine. Beatrix had called it "provocative for a girl of your standing" the one time I wore it. I stood in front of the mirror and fastened my mother's sapphires at my throat and looked at the woman looking back.She
THE HEIRESS BEHIND THE MADNESS Chapter 66: Fueling Julian's Obsession
WrenI had two seconds to decide which of my faces would survive the next minute.Oswin stood in the doorway with his cane and that fond, terrible smile, and the grief on my face was real. It had come up from somewhere low and I couldn't have stopped it if I'd tried. For ten years he had been a second father to me. I'd known for three days what he was, and it still felt like being told the house I grew up in had only ever been rented.But grief is a luxury. Behind Oswin, in the corridor, a light had come on.Julian's slippers. I knew them by sound, that soft, entitled shuffle. He appeared at Oswin's shoulder in his silk dressing gown, hair flat on one side, hazel eyes sliding over the room: me, Lyra barefoot on the sofa, the doctor by the door at five in the morning."Oswin?" he said. "I heard voices. What on earth...""The girls wandered," Oswin said, never taking his eyes off me. "I came to see them settled."I watched him wait for me to break. A madwoman would be sobbing by now. A
THE HEIRESS BEHIND THE MADNESS Chapter 65: The Broken Sisterhood
LyraI had just finished being sick into the bathroom sink when someone started pounding on my door.Not Julian. Julian knocks like a man apologising. This was three hard, flat raps, and then my bedroom door opened without waiting for an answer, and a hand closed around my wrist and hauled me out of the room before I'd found my voice."Don't scream," Wren said. "He's on the stairs."I should have screamed. Instead I let her pull me down the corridor in my bare feet, past the framed Turner prints and the cold marble console, into the penthouse's great living room. Dawn hadn't broken yet. London lay beyond the glass wall like a spilled jewel box, and in that grey light my sister looked like something carved out of ice.She wasn't humming. She wasn't rocking. She was dragging me by the arm like a woman who'd done it before.Dr. Vane stood at the door with his ear against the wood. He didn't look at me. He looked at my sister, quickly, the way you check a candle hasn't gone out, and she g
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