All Chapters of CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

February fifteenth. The day after. The twins went down for their afternoon nap at one-thirty, which meant we had roughly ninety minutes before someone woke up screaming about a dream or demanding juice or both.Ninety minutes was more than enough.I found them in the living room. Nate on the couch reading. Levi on the floor with his laptop, probably watching highlights of something he'd pretend was important. They both looked up when I walked in.I was wearing one of Levi's t-shirts. Just the t-shirt. No shorts. No bra. The hem hit mid-thigh and the neckline was wide enough to slip off one shoulder and I knew exactly what I looked like because I'd checked in the bathroom mirror.Levi's laptop closed slowly. Nate's book lowered."The twins are asleep," I said."How long?" Nate asked."Ninety minutes. Maybe.""Maybe?""Jonah's been fighting naps."Levi looked at Nate. Nate looked at Levi. Some silent calculation passed between them that I'd stopped trying to decode years ago. They had a

Nate listened without interrupting. That was the thing about him when something mattered. He went very still and he listened with his entire attention and he did not say anything until he was certain he had the full shape of it, and I stood in the east wing office and told him everything — Julian at the gate, the conversation in the entrance hall, the witness Serena had been building for weeks, and the thing I had understood at the end of it. Julian had come to find out if I was going to run. When I finished Nate looked at the wall for a moment. Then he said: “Who is the witness.” “I do not know,” I said. “He said someone who was present for something specific. Someone who has been talking to Serena for weeks.” “Someone inside the estate,” Levi said from the doorway. He had appeared sometime in the middle of what I was saying, the way he appeared when something was happening that required him. “Possibly,” I said. “Probably,” Levi said. He looked at Nate. “Hayes was feeding Vi

Nate drove. Not the driver. Nate, with Levi in the passenger seat and Julian still on the phone on speaker on the dashboard and the meeting room forty minutes behind them with twelve pack allies sitting in it wondering what had just happened. He had not explained when he left. He had stood up and said we are done for tonight and walked out and Levi had followed and that was the whole of it. The allies could wonder. The council could wonder. Everything could wait except this. “Tell me again,” Nate said. “From the beginning. Everything.” Julian’s voice came through the speaker, flat and careful, the voice of a man who had made a decision and was living with the weight of it in real time. “Serena came to me three weeks ago,” he said. “She told me she was filing the council challenge and she wanted me involved. She said she had a witness and she had the arrangement and she had the paternity question and all of it together was enough to bring Nate down.” He paused. “She told me my r

Victor was quiet for a long time after Crane finished. Not the processing quiet of someone absorbing information. The specific quiet of someone who already knew most of what they were being told and was deciding what to do with the part they did not know. I sat in the back of the car on the hard shoulder and listened to the silence on Crane’s phone and felt the twins and the cold air coming through the window Crane had cracked open and waited. Then Victor said: “Put her on.” Crane looked at me. He held the phone out. I took it. “Ella,” Victor said. “Victor,” I said. “Are you hurt,” he said. “No,” I said. “The children.” “Moving,” I said. “Both of them.” A pause. “Good,” he said. The word came out differently than I expected. Not with the controlled assessment he wore in the estate entrance hall or the careful honesty of the medical wing. Something underneath both of those things. Something that did not have a performance in it. “She used your contacts,” I said. “Yes,”

We left at seven thirty. Nate in the front, Levi and I in the back, Hayes in the car behind us with Marcus, and the estate receding in the wing mirror with Vivienne still somewhere inside it and Victor somewhere with her and the sitting room curtains finally closed. They had talked until four in the morning. I knew because I had heard them when I got up at three to use the bathroom, the voices still going, lower now but continuous, and I had stood in the corridor for a moment and listened to the sound of thirty years being worked through in real time and then gone back to bed. Nate had not slept. I knew that too. He had lain beside me in the dark and his breathing had not done the thing it did when he was asleep and I had not mentioned it because there was nothing useful to say about it and useful was still what I was choosing. He was composed in the car. Of course he was composed. He was always composed when it mattered most and it had never stopped being remarkable to me,