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Chapter 74: A Familiar Face
publish date:
2026-08-17 19:00:33
Latest chapter
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 77: Taking it on
POV: CharlotteThe building looked different from the inside.I’d built a whole picture of it from the outside over months, the brass plaque, the particular way Damien walked out of those doors with something quieter in him than when he’d gone in, and the inside didn’t match any of it. Clean, softly lit, deliberately unintimidating, and I walked through it beside him for the first time and kept my face easy.Keller was slight, late forties, careful in the way of someone who had delivered difficult news for long enough that precision and gentleness had become the same instinct. He shook my hand and said he was glad I’d come and I believed him, and we sat down and he opened the file.Forty minutes.That was how long it took, and in forty minutes I understood the situation more precisely than I had from months of observation and overheard phone calls and late night conversations combined. Keller spoke in the language of medicine and I stopped him tw
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 76: What She Doesn’t Know
POV: Victoria I walked out of the hotel feeling better than I had any right to feel. That was the truth, and I was trying to be honest with myself more consistently these days, it was one of the things I’d decided in Lisbon and had been attempting to maintain with varying success since coming home. So honestly, walking out of that hotel bar after ninety minutes with Sebastian Blackwood, I felt lighter than I had since the evening before. I knew all of that. And I still felt lighter. Because he’d listened. That was the simple, slightly embarrassing truth. He sat across from me and listened to everything I said with rapt attention that made you feel like the person in front of you was actually interested in what you were telling them rather than waiting for their turn, and I had been lacking that since I came back to New York, so much so that ninety minutes of
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 75: Someone Who Understands
POV: SebastianShe was easier to read than I’d expected.Not in a way that made her simple, Victoria Whitmore was not simple, I’d done enough research to understand that clearly before I sent the message last night. But she was readable in the way that people were predictable when they were carrying something heavy and hadn’t yet found the right place to set it down. The weight showed in small things, the way she'd held her glass, the slight tightening around her eyes when I said it wasn’t her fault, the specific quality of her silence when I said it, sitting with the sentence rather than deflecting it the way someone without that particular wound would have.She’d been hurt last night.Not just the rejection, though that was there too, I’d have been able to see that even without the information I already had. Something deeper than the rejection. Something about what the rejection confirmed, about what it told her about her own position in a situation
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 74: A Familiar Face
POV: VictoriaThe response came within minutes.”Someone who thinks you’ve been treated unfairly. Meet me and I’ll explain.”I should have put the phone down.Any reasonable version of myself, the version that had spent eight months in Lisbon becoming someone with better judgment than she’d had before, would have put the phone down and blocked the number and gone to bed and dealt with the humiliation of the evening in the private, undramatic way she’d been trying to deal with things lately.I didn’t put the phone down.I told myself it was curiosity. That was the most defensible explanation for why I agreed to meet a stranger who had somehow heard about a private conversation that had happened less than two hours ago. Curiosity. The itch of an unanswered question that had always been harder for me to resist than it probably should have been.We met the following evening at a hotel bar in midtown.Neutral ground. Public enough t
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 73: Humiliated
POV: VictoriaI drove home too fast.Not dangerously. Just faster than I usually drove, the kind of speed that comes from needing movement to do something with what’s sitting in your chest, from needing the city to blur slightly at the edges so you have something to look at that isn’t the inside of your own head.The office had been empty when I left.I’d walked out without looking back, which was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and I’d maintained that all the way to the elevator and through the lobby and to my car, and I’d completely keep myself together, every step of it, because composure was something I could do in my sleep and I was not going to give the building the satisfaction of falling apart in it.I fell apart in the car.Not visibly. Not dramatically. Just a long slow exhale that came from somewhere deep enough that my hands loosened on the steering wheel and I had to tighten them again deliberately, and a specific
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 72: He Told Her
POV: CharlotteHe came through the door at exactly twenty minutes.I was in the entrance hall when he arrived, and he saw me immediately, and something in his face when he did told me the drive home had been a kind of drive, the kind where you're carrying something and you know you’re carrying it and you’re moving toward the moment of putting it down.”Come and sit down,” he said.We went to the informal lounge and he sat across from me and didn’t hedge and didn’t build toward it. He just told me.Victoria. The late evening. Her timing deliberate, the office quiet, what she’d said to him standing close to his desk.We both know this marriage isn’t real, Damien. It never was.I felt it move through me before I’d finished processing it, something hot and immediate that started in my chest and moved outward, and I sat very still while he kept talking because the version of me that was listening needed to hear everything before the other versio
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