The Billionaire's Substitute Bride のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 61 - チャプター 70

Amelia's POV I sat in the car and held my phone and did not allow the thing trying to move through me to become panic.Panic was useless. I had learned that early in this process, in the first weeks when everything had been new and frightening and the shape of what I was dealing with had not yet become familiar. Panic spent energy without producing anything. What this moment required was not panic.It required thinking."Victor," I said. "The van that came to her building. The building manager saw it. Can we get a description?"Victor was already on his phone.He spoke briefly to someone I couldn't identify and hung up. "Rodriguez's team is at the building now. They'll get the description directly.""Good," I said.I looked at my phone.The last message from Nadia's number was the one she had sent me two days ago. Did you open it? She had been watching the house then. Present, alert, careful enough to track the delivery.Two hours after I left her flat she was gone.Two hours.Someon

Amelia's POV I showed Alexander the photograph at seven in the morning.I had been up since five. Not working. Just sitting in the east wing with the lights off and the photograph on my phone screen and the single line underneath it running through my head on a loop.Eight days is a long time. Ask yourself if she has that long.At seven I heard him in the corridor and I went out and showed him the screen without saying anything first.He looked at it.His face did the thing I had come to understand as his version of fury. Not loud. Not visible in any obvious way. A very controlled, very complete stillness that came from a man who felt things deeply and had learned a long time ago that showing them directly gave other people too much information."She's alive," I said. "As of whenever that was taken.""Yes," he said. His voice was level. "That's intentional. They want you to know she's alive because a living person is leverage. A person you can't locate and can't help." He looked at m

Amelia's POV Whitmore's profile arrived at eleven.I read it on the secure device Rodriguez's team had provided, sitting at my east wing table with my press documentation open on the laptop beside me and my tea going cold the way it always did when something pulled my attention completely away from everything else.Marcus Vane.Sixty-four years old. Born in Zurich. Educated in London and later in Paris, both at institutions that produced a specific kind of person, the kind who understood that real power was structural and patient and did not announce itself. No public company directorships. No board memberships in anything that carried a name people would recognise. A philanthropic foundation registered in Geneva that funded arts and cultural institutions across four countries, which explained the fashion week interest on paper and was, according to Whitmore's analysis, the primary mechanism through which he maintained legitimate connections to creative industries without ever appear

Amelia's POV The piece ran at nine o'clock that night.Diana had a contact at one of the three publications that covered fashion with the seriousness of a broadsheet and the reach of a platform that people actually read. The piece was published under my name. Amelia Quinn. Not Lia Hart, not Amelia Sterling, not any version of me that had been shaped by someone else's arrangement or someone else's theft.Just my name.And my words.I had written it in two hours at the hotel desk while Alexander sat on the sofa across the room working through his own documents and said nothing and asked nothing and was simply present in the way that had become the most valuable thing anyone had ever given me.The piece said what it needed to say.It said that Lia Hart was me. It said why. It said what had been taken and how and by whom, with specific names and specific facts and the clarity of someone who had been building toward this moment for long enough to know exactly what it needed to contain. It

Amelia's POV The venue smelled like new fabric and cold air and the particular electricity of a room that knew something significant was about to happen before it had officially started.I stood backstage in the narrow corridor behind the east wall and listened to the room fill.The sound was specific, not a crowd waiting for entertainment but industry people walking into a space and immediately understanding that what they had walked into was not what they expected. I could hear it in the pauses between conversations, the slight slowing of movement that happened when a room made a demand before it had asked anything directly.Jade was beside me with her tablet and her earpiece."Full room," she said quietly. "Ninety confirmed. Torres has positions at all four entry points and two inside." She paused. "Vane is seated. Front row, left side, seat four. Arrived ten minutes ago.""How does he look?" I said."Like someone who has been in important rooms his whole life and finds them unrem