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All Chapters of From Betrayed Luna to Crowned Princess: Chapter 211 - Chapter 220

247 Chapters

Chapter 213

Ravena's POV For a moment Vivienne could only stare at her.Her mouth opened and closed. And the colour came and went in her face."This," she said at last, and her voice cracked. "This was your idea. You arranged it with me. We sat in this very room and you proposed the wager, you said the words, you set the terms. How can you sit there now and twist it around like this? How can you lie to my face?"

Chapter 214

Ravena's POV "There is one more thing, Your Grace," I said pleasantly.Marianne's smile held, but I saw it cost her something now. "Oh?""The wager." I tilted my head, all innocence. "Lady Vivienne tells me the two of you made a proper bet on it. Ten thousand gold, was it not, on whether the new bride would give up her dowry. Well, I gave it up without a grumble, so by the terms Lady Vivienne set, she has w

Chapter 215

Ravena's POV The carriage turned off the home road and Vivienne immediately sat up straight."The cloth shop. Why are we going to the cloth shop? Ravena. Ravena, look at me. You are not going there to make another scene, are you? We have only just got the jade back, we have only just smoothed things over, you can't march into that shop now and start trouble in front of the whole trade row." Her voice climbed higher with every word. "It is half Marianne's, you understand, you can't. I forbid it. Do you hear me?"

Chapter 216

Ravena's POV The shop didn't even wait for us to send for the books.The very next morning, before I had finished my first cup, a man came up to the house from the trade row carrying the account ledgers under his arm. He was the shop's accountant, a thin man with ink-stained fingers and a soft voice, and he asked to see Lady Vivienne about the month's reckoning.I made sure to be in the room when he was sho

Chapter 217

Ravena's POV Suddenly, the accountant came off the chair and down on his knees on the rug so quickly the guard's hand slid off his shoulder, and he pressed his forehead near to the floor."Mercy, my lady. Mercy, I beg you. I am only a hired man, I keep the books I'm told to keep, I swear it on my life. It was never my scheme, none of it, I never took a single coin of it for myself." He was shaking all over. "It was Lady Cressida. It was her order, my lady, hers from the start. She comes to the shop herself, quietly, by the back, and she tells me what to wr

Chapter 218

Ravena's POV When the business of the shop was settled, I went back through the house to the reception hall, and the moment I stepped through the doors they were still there. All of them. Master Thornwell in the good chair by the window with a cup of tea cooling at his elbow. Mira with her boots up on a stool as if she owned the place. Rhea sprawled sideways across a bench with her red hair coming loose. Galen and Imeria and Wynn, deep in some argument about a poem none of them could quote right.

Chapter 219

Ravena's POV I heard my mother-in-law before I reached the door.I had only just come back to the manor, my head still full of incense smoke and the quiet of the memorial room, when a maid came running to find me with her face pale. “Lady Vivienne was in the accounting office,” she said, “and she was in a terrible rage, throwing things, and no one dared go near her.”Evander reached the door before I did, but I immediately caught his sleeve."Let me. Go and sit with your friends a while longer. I will see to your mother. This is my kind of trouble, not yours." I gave him a small smile. "You break armies. I break ledgers. Let each of us do what we are good at."He looked at me for a moment, then he brushed his knuckles once against my cheek and let me go. "Call for me if you need me.""I won't need you. But I'll call if I do."With that, I went in.The accounting office was a wreck. The real books had come back from the shop, brought by the trembling accountant under guard exactly as

Chapter 220

Ravena's POV "You do nothing yet," I said. "You let me tell you exactly how bad, and then you let me tell you how we get you out of it. Both. Because there is a way out, my lady, and I have already started walking us down it."I pulled a chair around and sat close to her, knee to knee, so she could not look away. “A thing like this can’t stay hidden. Cloth wears. It fades, it frays, a lady's fine new silk falls apart after one season and she takes it to another merchant and learns she was sold a cheap fake at a queen's price. And when one of them finds out, they all find out. It will spread through the capital like fire." I met her eyes. "And when it does, when the whole city learns that the shop has been selling counterfeit goods, every customer who was cheated will come pounding on the door demanding their money back, and worse. They will want someone punished. And who do you think they will come for first?"The colour drained from her face. "Me.""You. The largest shareholder. Th

Chapter 221

Ravena's POV I had the manager brought to me in a small stone room at the back of the manor.It was the deep middle of the night by then. I had spent hours over the true books and the contract, and I knew now almost everything the numbers could tell me. What I didn't yet have was the thing numbers can't hold. The intent behind them. And for that, I needed the man who had kept them.They sat him on a stool in the middle of the room, the shop's accountant and manager both, the soft ink-stained man who had come sighing about losses only that morning and now looked as though he had aged ten years in a day. A guard stood at his shoulders. And in the corner a small charcoal stove had been lit at my order, and its coals glowed low and red, and laid across the top of them was a long iron rod, and the tip of it was beginning to take on the colour of the coals.I sat down in the chair across from him and folded my hands, and I let him look at the rod for a while before I said anything."I am

Chapter 222

Ravena's POVDuchess Marianne's house was different at night.By day it had been all light and polish, grand rooms made to make a visitor feel small. But at this dark hour it was hushed and shadowed, and the servant who let us in did so with the stiff, uneasy manner of a household that had not expected callers and didn't know what to make of two women arriving with a stack of books and four silent guards at their backs.

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