All Chapters of Mira Reckoning: Love, Lies and Inheritance: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Adrian’s POV I had been ignoring her calls all afternoon. Not because I didn’t see them coming in, I saw every single one, but I was in the middle of something that required my full attention, and stopping to exchange words with Jessica was not something I had the patience for while my head was already occupied with work, so I let them ring out one after the other and kept going. By the time I was rounding up and pushing the last file to the side, my phone was showing seven missed calls from her. I picked up the next one. “Mother…” The sound that came through stopped me immediately. Her voice was muffled and broken in a way that made the words almost impossible to make out. She wasn’t speaking clearly; she was crying. “What’s wrong?” My voice came out sharp, “Mum, what happened? Talk to me.” She kept crying, something about warning me, something about how she had told me, the words dissolving into each other and making no sense. “Jessica.” My voice dropped, firm and direct,

Mira’s POV I walked my grandfather through the front door slowly, keeping my hand on his arm the whole way, making sure his steps were steady before I let him take the next one. He had insisted he was fine all morning, kept saying it from the moment he opened his eyes in the hospital bed, waving off the nurses and telling me I was fussing too much, but I had sat beside him through the entire night and watched his face when he slept, and fine was not the word I would have used. The doctor had been clear before we left. His body was becoming weak; he needed real rest, not the kind where he sat at his desk for slightly fewer hours, but actual, genuine rest, and I had nodded and held onto every word because someone in that room needed to take it seriously, and Grandfather clearly wasn’t going to do it himself. I settled him upstairs and made sure he was comfortable before I went back down to the kitchen. I spent close to two hours in there. I wanted to make something proper, some

Adrian’s POV I had just gotten back from the hospital when James pulled me aside quietly. “Sir, ma’am isn’t home,” he said, “she wasn’t here when I arrived, and I don’t have her number to reach her.” I looked at him, “What do you mean she isn’t home, since when?” “I’m not sure, sir; the maids said she left last night.” Last night. I stood there and let that sit for a second. She had been gone since last night, and nobody in this house had thought to mention it to me. I had spent the entire day trapped at that hospital with Jessica crying and accusing and refusing to let me leave, and all that time, Mira had been somewhere out there, and I hadn’t even known she was gone. I was heading toward her room to check for myself when the front door opened, and she walked in. I saw the disappointment immediately, she tried to cover it quickly, and she almost managed it. But it was there, carefully tucked behind the small, polite smile she arranged on her face the moment our eyes met. She

Mira’s POV The alarm pulled me out of sleep. I sat up slowly, stayed on the edge of the bed for a moment, just staring at nothing in particular. What happened last night came rushing in immediately. Every word I had said to Adrian replayed in my head one after the other. The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I felt. I had overreacted, I knew that clearly now. This was an arranged marriage; Adrian hadn’t signed up to report his every movement to me. He could do whatever he wanted; none of it was my business. So why had I stood outside speaking to him like it was? I needed to apologise. My phone buzzed on the bedside table. A message from grandfather, an address, his PA was waiting for me at a cafe so we could talk properly before I officially started at the company. We had spoken about it yesterday, but with everything that happened afterward, I had pushed it completely to the back of my mind. I got up, went to take my bath, the warm water helping me think a little

Mira’s POVJace drove, while I sat in the passenger seat, completely lost in my own head.I don’t even know how long I had been staring out of the window without seeing anything, just sitting there with Julie’s face and her smile and her voice replaying on a quiet loop somewhere in the back of my mind, the way she had said sister like it was a costume she could put on and take off whenever it suited her.“Mira.”I blinked and turned.Jace was looking at me briefly before putting his eyes back on the road, “You’ve been quiet for thirty minutes.”“Sorry,” I said, sitting up straighter, “I was thinking.”“Clearly,” he said, not unkindly.I checked the time and felt something shift in my stomach. It was past five, Adrian would either be home already or on his way, and after everything that happened yesterday and this morning, the last thing I wanted was to walk through that door and run straight into him before I had figured out what I actually wanted to say.My plan at this point was to