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CHAPTER NINE

Author: Black Willows
last update Petsa ng paglalathala: 2026-02-02 11:12:19
{Ava's POV}

I let Margaret's words settle into the air around me and did nothing with them.

I had learned a long time ago that there was a particular kind of person who fed on reaction — who sharpened their cruelty specifically against other people's pain — and that the most devastating thing you could do to someone like that was simply refuse to give them what they came for. So I kept my expression composed, my spine straight, and walked past her into the house as though she had said nothing mo
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  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

    Ava's POVPriya spread three folders across the conference table, each one thicker than it had any right to be for what amounted, in the end, to a dead end wearing a legal binder's clothing."Meridian Holdings dissolved eighteen months before Daniel's collapse became public," she said, flipping to a tabbed page. "The registered agent — the same lawyer we found on three other shell entities during last year's forensic audit — filed the dissolution personally. No successor entity named. No forwarding address for the principals."‘So it's a dead end.’"Not entirely dead. The mail-forwarding address currently using that suite number, the one your investor calls route through — it's a legitimate corporate services firm, been operating there for two years. They took over the lease after Meridian vacated. On paper, there's no direct line connecting the two." Priya closed the folder, frustration written plainly across her face, the specific frustration of a lawyer who preferred clean answers

  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

    Adrian's POVI fired an intern's draft back to him three separate times over a formatting inconsistency that would have taken me thirty seconds to fix myself, and only realized how disproportionate my reaction had been when Grady quietly closed my office door on his way out, the kind of gesture that meant — everyone on this floor currently thinks you're impossible to work with today.He wasn't wrong. It had been impossible for four days running, ever since a sheet of paper with two names on it had gone into my desk drawer and stayed there, unresolved, sitting like a live wire I kept circling without ever once touching.I threw myself at the Hendricks close instead, at three other deals that didn't strictly need my direct attention, at a due diligence file from the Chicago team that I read cover to cover twice purely because reading it meant I didn't have to think about anything else. Work had always been the one place my discipline never failed me. It failed me considerably less well

  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

    Ryan's POVI texted her at five. Dinner. My treat, no reason. Say yes.Ava: No fever, no crisis, no forgotten granola bar to guilt me with?Correct. Just dinner.Ava: Bold of you.I contain multitudes.Ava: Come at seven. Nora goes down around seven-thirty, so you'll get maybe twenty minutes of chaos before it's just us.I showed up at six-fifty with a bag from the Italian place near my building instead of the usual Thai, figured the evening deserved a change of routine to match the change in occasion, and Ava opened the door in leggings and an oversized sweater, hair loose around her shoulders in a way I rarely saw outside her own apartment, feet bare against the hardwood."You look like you're about to run a board meeting," I said.‘I'm not.’ She stepped back to let me in, and something about the easy way she did it — no hesitation, no calculation, just an open door — landed heavier in my chest than it probably should have for something so small. ‘That's the whole point of tonight,

  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

    Ava's POVNora was down for the night, Marta gone home an hour ago, and I sat on my own couch with a glass of wine I'd poured and mostly forgotten about, the Meridian Holdings discovery still turning over in my head like a stone I couldn't stop worrying with my thumb.I picked up my phone twice to call Sophie, to run the shell-company thread one more time before I let myself sleep on it, and put it down both times, because Sophie had already gone home to her own life, and this particular itch didn't actually need solving tonight. It needed something else. I sat with that realization a moment before I let myself admit what the something else was.I called Ryan.He answered on the second ring, no urgency in his voice, which told me he hadn't assumed a crisis the way he usually did lately when my name came up on his screen after nine at night. "Hey. Everything okay?":Everything's fine. I typed, since a video call felt like too much and a voice call meant Sophie's voice standing in for m

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    Adrian's POVPatterson called on a Thursday, mid-afternoon, while I was standing in the study reading the same clause in the Hendricks amendment I'd read four times already that week without once absorbing it."Mr. Cole. Sorry it took as long as it did." Her voice carried the particular relief of someone finally closing a loose thread they'd been chewing on for days. "I found the name. It wasn't in the formal visitor log — I told you it wouldn't be — but one of our night staff kept a personal notebook back then, informal sign-ins for anyone who came through after hours without a scheduled appointment. Old habit of hers, thankfully. She still had it.""And.""Felicity Marsh." She said it plainly, no weight attached on her end, a name that meant nothing to her beyond a line in an old notebook. "Came through asking almost the exact same questions you did. About a year ago, based on the date next to the entry."I said nothing for a moment, turning the name over, waiting for recognition to

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  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER ONE

    Ava’s POV~~~"I hate you to the bone, do you know that?"His voice hit me before I even had a chance to fully process what was happening. I had been standing by the living room entrance when Adrian came in, and I had made the mistake — the same mistake I made every single day — of hoping that today

  • The Muted Wife’s Return   PROLOGUE

    || Ava' POV ||The fact that my life was far from perfect was a fact I had to live with and of course make myself embrace ever since I was a young girl.I had a father who gambled away everything he touched…and a brother who treated me like something he scraped off the bottom of his shoe…and a condi

  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTEEN

    {Ryan's POV}I was still thinking about it an hour after it happened.I had watched a lot of people handle difficult moments in professional settings over the past few years — had sat across boardroom tables from men twice my age crumbling under pressure, had watched people with far more experience

  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIVE

    {Ava's POV}I stared at the message I had just sent and listened to my heart pound.Mr. Harold Bennett had been my father's closest friend and business partner for nearly two decades — the kind of man who had been a fixture at our dinner table when my mother was still alive, who had always spoken to

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