บททั้งหมดของ She died a wife, Returned a flame: บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

Adrian's POVThe silence after the gunshot was worse than the sound itself.I stood frozen, staring at Vanessa crumpled on the floor, her hand pressed against her shoulder where blood seeped through her silk robe. The gun had fallen from my hand when she'd lunged at me, and in the struggle, it had gone off.The baby's screams upstairs pierced through the ringing in my ears."Vanessa," I breathed, dropping to my knees beside her.Her eyes were wide with shock and pain, tears streaming down her face. "You shot me," she whispered. "You actually shot me.""It was an accident," I said quickly, my hands hovering over her wound, unsure where to touch. "You grabbed the gun, I didn't mean to...""Liar!" she screamed, then winced from the pain. "You're always lying!"I pressed my palm against her shoulder, trying to stop the bleeding. My mind raced, panic clawing at my throat. This wasn't supposed to happen. None of this was supposed to happen.Sheila had done this. She'd brought chaos into my

Sheila's POVPain woke me before consciousness did.It started as a dull throb at the base of my skull, then spread like fire through my entire body. My wrists burned where rough rope cut into skin. My shoulders screamed from being pulled at an unnatural angle. Every breath felt like swallowing glass.I forced my eyes open.The basement. Still in the basement.But something had changed. The quality of the darkness was different, thinner. Dawn was coming, though no light reached this place. I could feel it in my bones, the way the world shifted between night and day.How long had I been unconscious?I tried to move and discovered I was bound again, tighter this time. My wrists were tied behind my back, secured to a pipe running along the wall. My ankles were bound together. Adrian had been thorough.The storm had passed. I could no longer hear rain against the small window near the ceiling. The silence was absolute, oppressive. The kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums unt

Sebastian's POVThe failsafe timer hit zero at 4:47 AM.I'd been staring at my laptop screen for hours, watching the countdown tick lower and lower, praying it wouldn't reach the end. Praying Sheila would reset it, send some signal that she was still alive, still fighting.She didn't.The screen flashed red, and my stomach dropped. Automated uploads began immediately, files spreading through encrypted channels to every contact on her list. Journalists. Police departments. Medical boards. Government agencies.Her confession video started playing automatically, her voice filling my small apartment."If you're watching this, it means I've failed, or disappeared."I closed the laptop but her voice kept playing in my head. I'd heard her record that video. Watched her sit straight and calm in front of the camera, speaking with the certainty of someone who had already accepted every possible outcome.She'd known this might happen.I grabbed my phone and tried her burner again. Dead signal. N

Adrian's POVI heard myself shouting before I'd made the conscious decision to move.One moment I was standing there, gun in hand, staring at the woman who had systematically dismantled my entire life. The next, my hand had grabbed her by the collar and slammed her back against the wall so hard the pipe she was tied to shuddered against the concrete."You're lying," I heard myself say. "You're lying, you're making it up, you're doing exactly what you've been doing since you walked through my door."Sheila's head snapped back from the impact, but she didn't cry out. Didn't beg. She just looked at me with those steady, infuriating eyes and waited for me to finish."Kyle is a business associate," I said. "Vanessa recommended him because she believed in the opportunity. That's all it was. That's all.""Is that what you're telling yourself?""That's the truth.""The truth," she repeated softly, almost gently. "You've spent so long manufacturing your own version of the truth that you've for

Vanessa's POVMy arms were shaking.I told myself it was exhaustion. The sleepless nights, the blood loss from my shoulder, the weight of the baby against my chest. All reasonable explanations for why the gun trembled in my grip.But the truth was simpler and uglier than that.I was terrified.Not of Sheila, broken and barely standing at the bottom of my staircase. Not even of the doctor beside her, one hand still wrapped around her waist, his eyes watching me with the careful steadiness of someone trying not to escalate a situation that was already past escalating.I was terrified of myself. Of what I was holding. Of what I was considering.Of how easily the line between survival and something much darker had blurred in the past twelve hours."You ruined everything," I heard myself say again. The words came out flat this time, stripped of the anger that had propelled them the first time. What was left underneath was rawer. More honest.Sheila looked up at me from the base of the stai