All Chapters of Divorced: Ex-wife Heiress Strikes Back: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

FREDA.As the days rolled by, and even though I didn’t want to admit it, my paranoia had grown claws. It stalked my every waking moment, breathing down my neck even when I was alone. Every flicker of shadow felt deliberate and every reflection felt slightly off. I had once been a woman of steel; commanding, untouchable, and feared. Now, I flinched at my own silhouette.I had switched locations twice in a week alone. The first had been too exposed, having too many windows and too much glass. The second, a luxury apartment in the city, felt like a cage dressed in gold. Now I had settled in one of Bruce’s old safe houses on the outskirts — a low, nondescript building surrounded by forest and gravel, guarded by men I didn’t fully trust. But at least here, I could see my fear coming.Or so, I told myself.The days bled together. My mornings began with surveillance checks, my afternoons filled with silence, and my nights spent sitting in the dim glow of the security screens, as I watched th

ISABELLA.The first thing I felt when consciousness clawed its way back was pain; a deep, throbbing ache that started somewhere behind my eyes and radiated down my neck. My wrists burned where the metal cuffs had once held me, and every breath I took tasted like rust.I blinked into the dim, stuttering light above me. The bulb swung slightly, its rhythm syncing with the distant hum of machinery. Somewhere in the darkness, something was ticking, its sound slow like it was counting.Then came the static.A burst of white noise filled the air, followed by a calm and weirdly amused voice. Wakey wakey, Isabella.I flinched, my pulse spiking. The icy sound of his voice sent chills down my spine. It had haunted my dreams and whispered through the walls of my thoughts for weeks now. The cloaked figure.“You have one hour,” the voice continued. “One exit. Find it before time runs out. If you don’t…” A

BRUCE.The city still slept when I slipped out of the hospital. The corridors were quiet, washed in pale light, the smell of antiseptic clinging to my clothes. I had pulled out my IV line hours earlier, wrapped my leg myself, and walked past the nurses’ station like a ghost. No one dared to stop me, maybe because of the angry look I was sure was in my eyes.I hadn’t slept since the night of the explosion. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw flashes of smoke curling through steel beams, the mask glinting under emergency lights, the voice whispering through the dark. The world doesn’t revolve around you, Bruce.That voice had burned into my skull.Now, hours before dawn, I drove through the city’s outskirts in a sedan I had stolen from the hospital’s car lot, its headlights cutting through mist and ash. My leg throbbed with every push of the pedal. I felt the wound reopening beneath the bandage, but pain was a distant thing. Anger had taken its place, that and something colder, somethin

THE CLOAK.From my control room’s vantage, the metropolis above looked like a toy set under a child’s hand: traffic lights, storefronts, mansions, prisons; small things that could be easily nudged.I stood at the center of the room layered in the soft blue glow of dozens of screens. The room itself was sterile down to the last seam—white tile, brushed chrome, airflow that tasted faintly of ozone. Monitors climbed the walls in neat rectangles, each one a window into a life I had already begun to rearrange; Marcus’s study, Clarissa’s penthouse, Bruce’s safehouse, Devan’s cell, Freda’s holding room, and Isabella’s corridor of mirrors. Each image occupied its own square, its own tract on the grid of ruin I was composing.I never liked the sound of applause. I liked the quiet before it; the calculation, patience, and the slow threading of small things until a whole thing snapped into place. I liked watching people think they had time. I wanted every individual in my web to know what it mea

CLARISSA.I expected the drive home to help me breathe again, but the discovery from the mansion, the blueprints, the files, the phrases stamped in stark black letters didn’t leave my mind. Every turn of the wheel replayed my father’s voice from my childhood, cold and patient:Power isn’t given, Clarissa. Power is shaped.I had spent my life trying to outrun his definitions of strength. Now I was holding the proof that he had built a monster.My private fortress, a modern penthouse lined with reinforced steel and bulletproof glass, greeted me in silence. Beyond the glass walls, the city shimmered, unaware of the war unfolding underneath it. I swiped my key card and the locks clattered open in a sequence.I locked the door behind me, double-latched the steel bolt, and hurried up toward my study. The files weighed my laptop bag down like lead. I needed to scan the documents, cross-reference them, and hide the originals somewhere even the Cloak couldn't touch.I stood in the study going