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Chapter 136: Paranoia

Auteur: Penella
last update Dernière mise à jour: 2025-10-07 03:30:08

“There’s a traitor in your midst.”

The words dropped into the room like a death sentence. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it hurt. Zane froze mid-step, his jaw tight, his breath shallow. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The silence that followed was suffocating, thick with dread. And just like that, the world I thought I was barely holding together fractured again.

Even after he left, Marcus’s words replayed in my head like a curse that refused to loosen its grip. Over and over, his voice echoed, dragging me down into a pit I couldn’t climb out of.

I lay awake long after the men had left the room. Zane had stayed beside me, but even his steady breathing wasn’t enough to quiet the storm inside me. My eyes fixed on the ceiling, the shadows stretching long and monstrous in the dark, and I couldn’t stop hearing it: traitor, traitor, traitor.

Someone close to us. Someone who had smiled at me, maybe even held a door open for me, was the reason my face was splashed all over th
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  • The Vows We Fake    Chapter 147: The Suspect List

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  • The Vows We Fake    Chapter 145: A Verdict

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    The email sat open in front of me, glowing like a live bomb. I’d read it once, twice, three times, the words searing themselves into my brain until I almost couldn’t breathe. DNA paternity results: Subject A (infant) is 99.98% match with Subject B (Julian Moreau). No genetic match with Subject C (Zane Blackwood). I let out an ugly, strangled laugh. As if I hadn’t already known. As if I hadn’t suspected all along. Sera’s secrets had always dripped with the sour scent of desperation. She’d clung to Zane like a drowning woman, but her nights were spent tangled up with Julian. I had seen the hunger in her eyes when Julian’s name came up, the subtle curl of her mouth. Still, the cold certainty of proof sank into my bones like ice water. This was it. No more speculation. No more rumors. This baby, Catherine’s golden heir, the child the press was already painting as the future of Blackwood bloodlines… wasn’t Zane’s. It was Julian’s. I shut the laptop with a snap and pressed my palms to

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