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Home / Romance / 365 DAYS AS HIS WIFE / Chapter 41 - Chapter 48

All Chapters of 365 DAYS AS HIS WIFE: Chapter 41 - Chapter 48

48 Chapters

KARMA.

**CHAPTER 041** **CASSIAN'S POV** My mother's eyes hadn't moved from my face. "Longer than you think," she said. The words sat in the room like something that had been dropped from a height. I kept my expression completely still and ran through everything in my head — quickly, systematically — trying to calculate exactly what she could and couldn't have heard from the corridor. The fake papers. The plan. Isolde leaving to make it look convincing. All of it. "Mom," I said carefully. "How long have you actually been standing there?" She looked at me. Then at Isolde on the bed, who had the performance back in place — red eyes, weak posture, the picture of a woman who had just had the worst few days of her life and was barely holding herself together. My mother looked at Isolde for a long moment. Then back at me. "Long enough," she said, "to know that this is a difficult conversation and that it needed to happen." She stepped fully into the room, her handbag on her arm, her expr

I DON'T KEEP THINGS THAT DISAPPOINT ME.

**CHAPTER 042****ISOLDE'S POV**The cab took forty minutes.I sat in the back with my bags on the seat beside me and watched the city move past the windows and thought about nothing in particular. Or tried to. The particular nothing that required active maintenance — pushing things down as they came up, keeping the surface smooth, not letting anything sit long enough to become a feeling.Cassian's face when he said yes.I pushed it down.The Weldon mansion getting smaller in the rear window.Pushed that down too.The cab driver had the radio on low — some morning program with a man talking about something completely irrelevant in the cheerful tone of someone being paid to sound interested. I stared out the window and let it wash over me and breathed.Temporary, I reminded myself. All of it temporary.We pulled up to my father's house forty minutes later.I paid the driver. Got my bags. Stood on the pavement for a moment and looked at the front door.The same front door I'd walked out

KIDNAPPED.

**CHAPTER 043****ISOLDE'S POV**The house was big.Not Weldon-big — not the kind of big that came from generations of accumulated wealth and the architectural need to demonstrate it. But big in the comfortable deliberate way of someone who had earned money recently and had spent it on space because space was the first thing you bought when you'd grown up without enough of it.Daniel Park had grown up without enough of it.I knew this because he'd told me once, early on, in one of those late night conversations that happened when people were tired enough to say things they usually kept better organized.Two-bedroom apartment. Four siblings. A mother who worked two jobs and came home too tired to cook but always did anyway. He'd told me all of it with the particular openness of someone who had made peace with where they came from and didn't feel the need to hide it.I had listened and filed it away and said the right things.He was standing at the door when my cab pulled up.Already th

RISE AND SHINE.

*CHAPTER 044***ROSA'S POV**The last thing I remembered was Michael's face.That gap in the van doors — narrow, closing fast — and his face in it. The expression his eyes portrayed. That completely unguarded, completely undisguised expression that I had never seen on him before and which I held onto as the gap closed and the dark swallowed everything.Then nothing.Then this.I came back slowly.The way you came back when your body had decided to take you somewhere without your permission and was only now returning you — reluctantly, in stages, handing things back one at a time. Sound first… Then the cold — concrete cold, the specific kind that came up through surfaces that had never been warmed by anything and weren't going to start now. Then the weight of my own body, heavy and wrong-positioned, my arms pulled back behind me at an angle that my shoulders were already registering complaints about.Then the dark.

WHAT IF THIS IS IT?

*CHAPTER 045***ROSA'S POV**Elena had a chair brought to her.She pulled it up directly in front of me with the unhurried ease of someone who had nowhere more important to be — crossed her legs, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at me across the space between us with those dark steady eyes.Like we were about to have a conversation over coffee.Like I wasn't tied to a chair in a concrete warehouse with four armed men standing at the edges of the room."You're not as scared as I expected," she said."I'm terrified," I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to. "I'm just not going to let you see it."She smiled. "Fair enough."She looked at the men. One gesture — small, authoritative — and they moved. All four of them, filing toward the far end of the warehouse without a word, without question, disappearing into the shadows at the edges of the space until it was just the two of us and the

THAT WAS EVERYTHING.

**CHAPTER 046****MICHAEL'S POV**The park was still moving around me.That was the thing that kept registering — how completely ordinary everything continued to be. The vendor at his cart looking over with an uncertain expression, still holding the bag I'd ordered. A child on a bicycle wobbling past the exact spot where the van had been thirty seconds ago. Two women on a bench who had looked up at the sound of Rosa's voice and were now looking at each other trying to decide if what they'd seen was what they thought they'd seen.The world just — continuing.I stood where I was for exactly three seconds.Then I moved.The bracelet.Six months ago I had bought it from a jeweler on the east side and taken it to Drake — a man I had been using for seven years, a man whose particular skill set existed in the space between what was officially sanctioned and what was actually effective.He had fitted a tracker into

MY DAUGHTER.

**CHAPTER 047****MICHAEL'S POV**The ceiling was white.That was the first thing. White ceiling, bright lights, the antiseptic smell that existed nowhere else on earth and which my brain identified before I was fully conscious — the smell of a place that cleaned itself constantly because it had to, that maintained a specific standard of sterility because the alternative was unacceptable.Hospital.I sat up."Mr. Cross—" A voice immediately. Close. Cautious.I was already moving — swinging my legs over the side of the bed, the hospital gown an immediate problem, the IV in my left arm a secondary one. My chest was tight in a way that was probably medically significant and which I noted as something to address later. My vision was slightly off — not the smoke-induced doubling from the warehouse, something cleaner than that, the specific off-ness of a system that had been through something and was still recalibrating."Mr. Cross, please, you really need to—""Rosa," I said. "Where is she

I SEE YOU.

**CHAPTER 048****ELENA'S POV**The house felt different when he got back.Not different in any way I could point to specifically — the same marble floors, the same high ceilings, the same perfect order that Michael maintained with the specific thoroughness of someone for whom order was functional. Everything exactly where it was supposed to be. Everything exactly as it had always been.But Michael was different.That was what I was noticing. What I kept noticing, no matter how many times I told myself to stop noticing it and focus on what needed to be done next.I heard that he managed to find Rosa and save her… and that they were both taken to the hospital, but ever since he came home from the hospital he… changed in some way that I didn't have a precise name for. Not visibly — not in any way that someone who didn't know him would catch. He was still controlled. Still measured. Still moving through the house with that deliberate precision he brought to everything.But his eyes were

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