All Chapters of Married To A Monster: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Zara’s POVI didn’t sleep. I didn’t even blink properly. The house had been turned into a hospital—white coats, clipped footsteps, doors that hissed instead of creaked—but I still felt the wind of old corridors. The ghosts here had manners. They waited until you were alone to breathe down your neck.The note was folded in my pocket until the paper softened with body heat. If you want the truth, visit her doctor. No name. No logo. Just a veiled finger pointing at a door I couldn’t yet see.Her doctor. I knew who her was.I started quiet. A question slipped down a hallway. A favor called in with a housekeeper who liked to talk when she ironed. A glance at the service lifts’ call logs. I didn’t wear heels. I didn’t wear perfume. I wore silence like a uniform and moved through the estate like I was born in the walls—because I was.A nurse by the night station flinched when I leaned an elbow on her desk.“Busiest wing in the city,” I murmured. “Still, I’ve never seen so many deliveries for

Zara’s POVThe door shut behind him with a hush like a secret keeping itself. He stopped dead when he saw me in his chair—my heels on his rug, my fingers resting lightly on the leather arms like I’d always belonged there.He tried to square his shoulders. They rounded instead.“Who are you?” he asked, a little too sharp to be brave, a little too thin to be defiant.I let the silence breathe, then tilted my head. “Who do you think?”His gaze flicked to the credenza—photos, diplomas, the polite proof of a polite life. A careful man. A man who liked routines and doors that locked.“I don’t—” he began.“Zara Black,” I said softly. “Don Enzo’s daughter. Lucien’s wife.”Color drained out of his face so fast I could almost hear it. “I—see.”“Good.” I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward onto the desk, voice calm, almost kind. “Then this will be simple.”He swallowed. “Ms. Black, I don’t accept drop-ins. If you’d like to schedule—”“We’re scheduling a different kind of appointment.” I pointed

Lucien’s POVThe headline wouldn’t stop screaming, no matter how many times I crushed the screen and reopened it.LUCIEN BLACK EXPECTING—NOT WITH HIS WIFEThe font was loud on purpose. It knew it was a weapon and enjoyed the blood.I called the first editor at 6:12 a.m.—woke him from whatever cheap sleep journalists buy when they sell their souls at midnight.“Who gave you this?” I asked.He tried to be clever. “We don’t reveal sources.”“You’ll reveal your teeth to a dentist who works in a basement if you don’t answer me. Who. Gave. You. This.”A stammer, a shuffle, a weak lie: “We aggregate from reputable—”“Give me the name or give me the invoice you sent Senator Moore’s fixer.”The silence after that had a shape. Fear, trying on denial. Then the line died.I called the next outlet, then the next. Some pretended they had interns; some pretended they had standards. All of them had the same headline queued with the same art: a photo of me walking out of a clinic with an expression th

Zara’s POVNight wears this estate better than day. The lights on the terraces float like promises that no one intends to keep. The hedges stand at attention, squared, disciplined, as if trimmed by men who believe order can tame hunger.I walked anyway.After dinner I’d endured Lucien’s silence the way a cliff endures the sea—carved by it in ways you can’t see until the next morning. Vanessa had glided past the table like a swan that thinks it’s a shark. Enzo’s men had posted themselves where shadows look heavier. The staff had learned how to breathe without making sound.I needed the air.The south path cuts behind the orangery, then splits—left toward the maze, right along the old stone wall that remembers other names. I took right. Fewer lights. More truth.The first prickle came at my neck—not fear. Instinct. The kind my father beat into me until it learned to wake before danger does.I didn’t turn around. Turning around tells the hunter you’ve seen him.I slipped my phone into my

Lucian’s POVFather.The word had sat heavy on my chest for weeks, dragging me into a place I didn’t recognize. I’d paced nights thinking about small hands, the sound of laughter in the halls I’d turned into mausoleums. I’d told myself that whatever else Vanessa was, at least she had given me that—blood carried forward, proof that my line wouldn’t end with me.And now?Now the files in my hands told me I’d been played like a violin. Sonograms forged months before her touch. Metadata screaming lies. A baby that never existed, except in her hunger to chain me to her.I wanted to rip the skin from my own bones.“Boss,” one of the men croaked from the chair, his voice muffled around swollen lips. “You should know—”I turned slowly, fire crawling through my veins. “What else?”The enforcer licked blood off his mouth, eyes darting between me and the shadow where Zara stood like judgment itself. “It wasn’t just the girl she wanted gone. It was her father. Don Enzo. She paid us to get him sic