Library
Search
Home / Romance / The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back / CHAPTER 22: SERAPHINA MONROE

Share

CHAPTER 22: SERAPHINA MONROE

Author: LisaWrites
last update publish date: 2026-07-09 00:47:13

The train station was forty minutes from the clinic on foot.

Seraphina knew this because she had walked it, in the thin early morning rain, in the ivory dress that had dried overnight into something stiff and slightly misshapen, with the folded papers tucked into her waistband and the dead phone in her pocket and the women's shelter two blocks behind her where she had slept for four hours on a narrow cot and woken before anyone else was awake.

She had not taken anything from the shelter that wa
Continue to read this book for free
Scan code to download App
Previous Chapter Next Chapter
Locked Chapter

Latest chapter

  • The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back   CHAPTER 68: EVERYTHING I OWN

    The silence lasted a long time.Seraphina looked down at him and he looked up at her and the office held them both in the particular, pressurized stillness of a moment that understood its own weight and was making room for it.She was the one who broke it.Not with words — with movement, the slight shift of someone who has been very still for a long time and has decided that stillness is no longer the correct response to what is happening in front of them.She leaned back in her chair.She looked at him."Get up," she said quietly."No," he said.She looked at him."Sebastian—""I've been standing up my entire life," he said. "I've been the man in the room who stood up and made decisions and delivered verdicts and walked away from things that required me to stay and I have been standing up consistently and confidently for thirty-two years and it has produced—" he paused, "—this. Which is me on the floor of your office because standing up is no longer the correct posture for what I'm t

  • The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back   CHAPTER 67: ON HIS KNEES

    The call came at eight fifteen AM.Not from Seraphina directly — from Noah, with the specific, compressed brevity of a message that had been dictated rather than composed.*CEO Monroe requests your presence at Verve headquarters at nine AM. Her office. Please confirm.*Sebastian read it.He typed back: *Confirmed.*He put on his jacket and told James he was going out and walked to the Verve tower in the cold morning air because walking felt correct, because arriving in a car felt like arriving with something and he was trying to arrive with nothing.The lobby received him the same way it always did.The elevator took him to the thirty-second floor.Noah was waiting."She's ready for you," Noah said, with the careful neutrality of someone who had been in the vicinity of his employer's mood this morning and was managing the information responsibly.Sebastian walked to the office door.He knocked."Come in," she said.He opened the door.She was behind her desk.Not at the window, not at

  • The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back   CHAPTER 66: THE DEEDS

    Crawford arrived at the King Group at seven AM.This was not unusual — Sebastian had been calling early meetings for two weeks now, ever since the banquet, the pace of things requiring the kind of morning hours that the rest of the day didn't reliably provide. Crawford had adapted with the professional flexibility of a lawyer who understood that his most significant clients operated on schedules that preceded sunrise.What was unusual was the instruction Sebastian gave him before Crawford had fully settled into his chair."I want to transfer my personal assets," Sebastian said. "All of them."Crawford looked at him."Your personal assets," he said carefully. "As distinct from your King Group holdings.""Yes," Sebastian said. "The personal portfolio. The property interests outside the estate. The investment accounts held in my name individually. The art holdings. The private equity positions that sit outside the corporate structure." He paused. "All of it."Crawford was quiet for a mom

  • The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back   65: FROM AFAR

    Sebastian was in his study when James knocked.It was late — past eleven, the estate quiet around him in the particular way it was quiet on evenings when he had been sitting in the same room for too long and the house had given up expecting him to move.He had been reading the Verve partnership documents again.Not because they required further reading — he knew them by now with the thoroughness of someone who had read the same thing enough times that it had stopped being information and become something closer to a ritual, a way of being legitimately in the vicinity of something connected to her without being in her vicinity."Sir," James said from the doorway. "I thought you should see something."He set a tablet on the desk.Sebastian looked at it.A video. Eleven seconds. Shot from a distance on what appeared to be a phone camera — slightly unsteady, slightly compressed, the quality of footage captured quickly by someone who had made a fast decision to capture it.A hotel corridor

  • The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back   CHAPTER 64: THAT'S FOR FIVE YEARS AGO

    The corridor outside the private dining room was empty.Seraphina walked through it with Noah two steps behind her and Katherine already on her phone ahead, the smooth, coordinated exit of a team that had done this before and knew how it went.The elevator was at the far end of the corridor.She was halfway there when she heard the dining room door open behind her.She didn't turn around immediately.She knew the footsteps — had known them for twenty-two years, had grown up listening to them on the stairs of a house that had never felt like home, had learned the difference between the measured, deliberate steps Clara used when she was performing and the faster, less controlled steps she used when she wasn't.These were the second kind."Seraphina."She turned.Clara was in the corridor, the dining room door swinging shut behind her, and she had the specific, unmanaged quality of someone who had been containing something all evening and had reached the precise limit of containment and

  • The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back   CHAPTER 63: THE WOLVES

    Victor stared at the document for a long time.Seraphina watched him read it the way she watched everything that required assessment — with the full, focused, unsparing attention of someone who understood that the details were where the truth lived and that the truth of this moment lived in Victor's face as he processed what was in front of him.He read slowly.Page one. Page two.He turned to page three and stopped.He looked up."This is everything," he said. "This acquisition — this takes everything. The building. The subsidiary interests. The intellectual property. The client relationships." He looked at her. "This takes thirty years of work.""Yes," she said."For this figure.""Yes.""Seraphina." His voice had changed. The careful, performed warmth of the dinner's opening was gone entirely, replaced by something rawer and less managed — not grief exactly, not yet, but the specific, pressurized precursor to it, the emotional state of a man who has just fully understood the shape

More Chapters

You may also like

Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on GoodNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP
DMCA.com Protection Status