The Secret Billionaire Heiress Strikes Back のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 221 - チャプター 229

Chapter 221— The Woman in GreenSable did not believe in ghosts.She believed in cameras. She believed in key cards and timestamps and the small, boring details people forgot to cover when they were busy covering the big ones. In fifteen years of doing this work, she had never once found a true dead end. Every door opened, if you were patient and mean enough with it, and Sable was both.So when Marcello told her someone had reached into his timing system on race night and walked out clean, she didn't say *impossible*. She said, "Give me the footage," and got to work.It took her four days.The control booth at the King's Race was supposed to be locked down tight. Only cleared people got in — timing crew, two of Marcello's own men, the event coordinator. Every one of them wore a badge, and every badge was logged, and Sable had all the logs.The logs said nothing was wrong. Every entry matched a name. Every name matched a face.That was t

Chapter 223 — The GrabThe afternoon was ordinary, right up until it wasn't.Dante had taken R to the riverside market on a Saturday, the way he'd promised. It was the busy one, the good one, with stalls packed tight along the water and a crowd thick enough that you had to hold hands to stay together. There was a man who sold roasted corn. There was a woman with painted kites on long strings. And near the far end, past the fruit sellers, there was a toy stall that R had been talking about all week, because it had the little dinosaurs. The toy ones. The three-horned kind."Can we see the dinosaurs now?" R asked, for the fourth time, tugging at Dante's good hand."Soon," Dante said. "Stay close. Hold on."His ribs ached. They always ached now, a dull deep burn that woke up whenever he did too much, and walking slow through a thick crowd with a five-year-old was apparently enough to do it. His shoulder was worse. The doctors had said six weeks minimum, an

Chapter 225R understood everything in about four seconds.He was good at understanding things quickly. He'd always been good at it. And so when the biggest man he had ever seen scooped him up out of the scary man's hands and held him tight against a chest like a wall, and said, in a voice rough with fear and relief, *"I've got you, I've got you, you're safe, I've got you"* — R understood.These were the uncles.Rhysian's uncles. Uncle P and Uncle O. The horse and the knight. R had seen them a dozen times from across the park, two big men who watched over his friend, his brother, the boy with his same face. He knew exactly who they were.And they thought he was Rhysian.He could see it in their faces, close up now for the first time. The one holding him — Uncle O, it had to be, the grumpy one, except he didn't look grumpy now, he looked like he might cry — kept touching R's cap, his shoulder, his back, checking him over, saying his b

Chapter 227It was in the car that the first small wrongness found a gap to slip through.Dante had carried the boy all the way back to the lot, refusing to set him down even though his shoulder howled with every step, and buckled him carefully into the back seat, and gotten himself behind the wheel with the specific slow care of a man whose body had just been pushed far past where it should have gone. He sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel, breathing, waiting for the shaking to pass enough that he could drive.He glanced in the mirror to check on R.And he frowned.Something was off. He couldn't place it at first. The boy was sitting very straight and very still in the back seat, hands folded in his lap, looking out the window. Fine. Safe. Right.But the clothes.Dante had dressed R himself that morning. He remembered it clearly, because R had complained about the collar — the white top, the one with the little buttons, and the br

His parents had died when Rhys was still a teenager. A car accident, the papers had said. An accident. Rhys had never fully believed that word, and the not-believing had curdled in him for years, but believe it or not, they were gone, and they had left him alone — truly alone, no brothers, no sisters, no aunts or cousins that mattered, nothing. Just a boy in a black suit standing between two coffins, and then the seven years nobody talked about, the seven years Rhys never let himself think about in daylight.And out of those seven years, somehow, impossibly, had come a child.Rhys didn't know how. That was the ugly truth he had never told a living soul. There had been a time, in that place, when he'd been held down and made to drink something against his will, and the world after it came to him only in flashes — lights, a room, hands, nothing he could hold onto, nothing he could build into a story. He remembered almost none of it. He had spent years trying not