Todos os capítulos de Game Of Chess With My Ex-Husband's Uncle : Capítulo 81 - Capítulo 90

~ Vivienne's POVThe shock that coursed through my body was so intense it felt physical, like ice water had been dumped over my head. Lorenzo was here. Actually here, standing in Dante's hospital room, his presence filling the space in a way that made it hard to breathe.He had heard the rumors. That realization hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest. Somehow, despite all my precautions, despite all the walls I had built around this secret, the whispers had reached him. And unlike other people who might have dismissed gossip or simply been curious, Lorenzo had come himself. Had driven to this hospital, demanded to know where my son was, and walked into this room with the kind of determination that suggested wild horses couldn't have stopped him.My heart hammered against my ribcage so hard I was sure he could hear it. The fluorescent lights overhead seemed too bright suddenly, highlighting every detail of this nightmare scenario with cruel clarity. Lorenzo's expensive suit, probably

~ Vivienne's POVThe chaos of movement swirled around me as medical staff appeared seemingly out of nowhere, responding to Eric's calls with efficient urgency. Lorenzo was giving instructions, his voice firm and commanding as he coordinated with Dr. Morrison who had arrived within minutes. Dante was being prepared to be moved to a different ward, one better equipped for the pre-transplant procedures that would need to begin immediately.I watched it all from my chair, feeling strangely disconnected from the scene unfolding before me. Nurses bustled around Dante's bed, checking his IV lines and monitors with practiced hands. One of them, a middle-aged woman with kind eyes and graying hair pulled back in a neat bun, gently adjusted the thin white blanket covering my son, tucking it around his small frame with maternal care.Lorenzo stood beside the bed, his tall frame somehow not seeming out of place among the medical equipment and scrub-clad staff. He had removed his charcoal suit jack

The security guards did not let go of Marco's arms until they reached the main entrance of the hospital, and even then, they stood watching as he walked through the sliding doors and out into the cold night air, making sure he kept moving. He didn't give them the satisfaction of looking back. He walked to the end of the covered walkway and stopped, pressing his fist against one of the support columns, breathing through his nose in short, controlled bursts that were doing absolutely nothing to manage the heat climbing up the back of his neck.The night was clear and cold, the parking lot spread out before him under the white wash of security lighting. A couple walked past him toward the entrance, the woman carrying a bunch of flowers wrapped in cellophane, the man holding a sleeping child against his shoulder. Marco barely saw them. He was seeing the inside of that hospital room. The look on Vivienne's face. The look on Lorenzo's face. The DNA report that the doctor had held up like a

~ Lorenzo's POVThere is a particular kind of stillness that comes over a man when the ground shifts beneath him and he hasn't yet decided how to respond to it. I have felt it twice in my life before the night I walked into that hospital ward. Once when I was nineteen and found my mother on the floor of our apartment, and once when I was twenty-five and stood outside the Blackwell estate for the first time with my full name on my tongue and a very clear understanding of what I intended to do with it. Both times, the stillness lasted only a moment before something harder and more purposeful took its place.The night I walked into Dante's ward, the stillness lasted considerably longer.Eric had come to me. That was how it began, which was its own kind of statement, because Eric did not come to people with things unless the thing was serious enough to override his considerable preference for detachment. He had sat across from me in my office and told me about the boy in plain, careful la

~ Vivienne's POVI had seen the headline forty minutes before he arrived.I had been sitting at my kitchen counter with a cup of tea going cold beside me, scrolling through my phone with the absent, winding-down quality of someone at the end of a long day, and then the notification had appeared and I had clicked it open and read it, and the tea had remained untouched for the rest of the evening.I had not called him. I had sat with it instead, turning it over, feeling the particular quality of the anger it produced in me, which was different from the anger I was accustomed to feeling about things connected to the Blackwell family. This was not the cold and strategic anger that I had refined over five years into something useful. This was something more immediate and more personal, the anger of a woman who had allowed herself to be seen and had been punished for it, whose decision to stop being careful had been picked up and made into a weapon within days of her making it.I knew who h