All Chapters of Betrayed, I Become The CEO'S Contracted Bride: Chapter 351 - Chapter 360

Elara sat at the kitchen table at 1:15 in the morning. Mira and Lucia were asleep upstairs. The refrigerator started, ran for several seconds and stopped again.A legal pad lay open in front of her. She had reduced Vass's disappearance to the facts that still held: the warrant entered the system before she left, and it became usable after she was gone. Everything between those points remained blank.The dedicated phone vibrated beside her hand.Vass had refused Hammond's investigators and chosen Elara, the doctor who understood what the records had done to the children.Elara set down her pen and answered. "Yes?""Are you alone?"She recognized Vass at once. The words came through in short breaths, each one followed by an effort to steady the next."I'm alone in the kitchen," Elara said. "Nobody else is awake.""Good."Traffic moved behind Vass, close and heavy. Metal scraped across concrete, then stopped."Where are you?""I'm not answering that.""Are you indoors?""Stop asking wher

Mira smoothed Lucia's green shirt across the coffee table. Once the sleeves lay flat, she brought the hem up to the collar and added it to the finished stack. Heat from the dryer still clung to the cotton.Across from her, Elara sat on the sofa with Hammond's legal pad on her knees. A line divided the page down the middle. The left side held the things his office could limit if Leonie Vass came in with Arthur's records. The right side was still blank.The dedicated phone rested beside Elara. It hadn't made a sound since the call ended.Mira picked up a pair of Lucia's trousers and matched the legs. Elara had been reading the same section of blue ink for most of the time Mira had been folding. Her pen hadn't touched the paper once.That wasn't how Elara worked.Arthur Vance's network had once reduced Mira to scores and codes, so she knew what Elara looked like when a page contained a problem she could solve. The pen moved. Numbers appeared. By the time anyone else understood there was

Elara kept her left hand out of her coat pocket because there was nothing in it. Hammond had her phone upstairs, along with her watch and the keys she usually forgot could record sound. Vass had asked for no electronics, and the empty weight at Elara's side reminded her that Hammond had kept the agreement.The revolving doors at Foley Square turned again. Another group crossed the lobby toward the metal detectors, none of them pausing to search for Elara.Vass had chosen the meeting time after Hammond accepted her conditions. The minute had arrived. Elara watched the entrance without checking a screen, counting the space between each turn of the glass instead.For days, Leonie Vass had been a voice on a dedicated phone and the only person holding Arthur's original books. Elara had started thinking of her as part of the case rather than a person who still had to walk through a public door.Then a woman in a gray wool coat stepped inside alone.The plain black bag against her hip could

Alexander kept the engine running at the pickup curb outside the federal building. A metal sign bolted to a street pole warned that stopped vehicles would be towed.He watched the glass doors at the top of the wide stone steps. The curb was restricted and heavily monitored by cameras mounted on the walls. Security would move him along in a few minutes if Elara did not appear.He had driven himself because she had sent a short message asking him to collect her. She had not asked for a company car. A driver had not been requested to bring her home. His afternoon had been cleared so he could drive to Manhattan alone.They had not lived in the same house for three months. But she was still his wife. He refused to decide her request meant anything more than transport before she reached the street.She walked out of the building. The dark coat she had left in this morning was buttoned to her throat. Her hands carried no bags and held no documents.Her day had been spent inside with the woma

The temporary case room smelled of fresh toner. Hammond's phone lay facedown beside a yellow pad marked NOON at one end of the long worktable. Numbered photocopies covered everything else.The evidence staff had taken Vass and the original records elsewhere. They had left Elara stamped working copies of the conversion tables.Hammond checked the time. "Give me a minimum we can defend."Elara pulled the first 3 pages toward her. "Duplicates don't count twice. If the same symbol moves between clinics or appears in another ledger, it's still 1 subject.""And broken rows?""Provisional. No clinic or formulation match, no place in the confirmed count."That might make the result smaller than the truth, but Hammond could defend it to the prosecutor. A guess would give Arthur's lawyers something to pull apart.Hammond taped the continuation pages to the blank wall while Elara made the first column on the legal pad. He called out a code. She found the private mark attached to it, followed the