All Chapters of THE WRONG SISTER : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

44 Chapters

Chapter 31: A Web of Betrayal

She didn’t sleep.She lay in the dark beside Caelum, his arm heavy and warm across her waist, his breathing slow against the back of her neck.She stared at the ceiling with Viktor’s note sitting in her memory like something she couldn’t unfeel.The game is almost over. Be ready to choose.Isolde had kept it, filed it with a date in her own handwriting like it was something worth preserving. Like it was something she’d wanted to be able to find again. Like Viktor mattered to her.At six in the morning she carefully lifted Caelum’s arm, slid out of bed, and got dressed in the dark without making a sound.-----She called Thorne from the car.“I need to see you,” she said. “This morning.”“It’s barely...”“This morning, Father.”A pause. “Is something wrong?”“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”-----The Valehart mansion looked the same as it always had from the outside — grand and composed. She’d grown up inside those walls knowing that the outside and the inside rarely told the same st

Chapter 32: The Enemy’s Move

She drove back to the estate with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.The city moved around her — morning traffic, people with coffee cups and somewhere to be.Thorne's silence haunted her.She’d asked him the most important question of her life and he’d stood there in his sitting room and said absolutely nothing. And she’d walked out because staying felt worse than leaving, and now she was twenty minutes from home with a note in her bag and a silence in her chest that was getting heavier more and more.She pulled into the estate just after eight.-----Caelum was still in the bedroom when she came upstairs. He was dressed but hadn’t done his tie yet, sitting at the edge of the bed and scrolling through something on his phone.He looked up when she walked in.“You were gone early.” His eyes moved over her face carefully. “Everything okay?”“I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a drive.” She set her bag down and crossed to where he was sitting. His tie was on the bed beside him. She

Chapter 33: The Test of Loyalty

The board meeting ended at noon. Viktor left first, which was somehow worse than if he’d stayed — that easy, unhurried walk to the door with jacket button done up, like he’d accomplished exactly what came for and had somewhere better to be. Caelum watched him go without a word. Then he turned to Silas. “Get me everything on the three board members he’s been talking to. Their financials, voting history, any outside relationships with Ashbourne Holdings.” He gathered his documents. “I want it before tonight.” “I’ll have it by five,” Silas said. Marcelline stood and smoothed her jacket. She looked at Arwen once, briefly assessing, and then looked at her son. “We should talk this evening.” “Tonight,” Caelum said. “Yes.” The room cleared out steadily after that. Simone slipped out with her laptop under her arm. The board members filed out in clusters of two and three, talking quietly. And then it was just the two of them — Caelum still at the table, straightening documents he’d alre

Chapter 34: A Crack in the Foundation

Three days into it, she started leaving the dining room earlier.Not because she had anywhere urgent to be. Just because the alternative was sitting in the dining room across from Caelum while Rowan stood somewhere behind her left shoulder, and they moved through breakfast like people performing a version of normal that nobody in the room actually believed.“You have the Verdant call at ten,” Caelum said that morning, not looking up from his phone.“I know.”“Silas will sit in.”“I know that too.”He briefly looked up then. Something moved across his face — not quite the wall, but not the warmth either. Something in between that she didn’t have a name for yet.“Good,” he said, and looked back down.She finished her coffee and left the table.The Verdant work was the only thing that felt like hers anymore.She threw herself into it the way she’d been doing since the beginning, except now there was an edge to it — a desperation she hadn’t had before. The corkboard had grown. New photogr

Chapter 35: The Reckless Bid

She didn’t tell anyone.Not Caelum, not Silas, not Rowan, who was outside her office door every morning when she arrived and every evening when she left, completely unaware that the woman he was guarding had spent the last four days making phone calls nobody had authorized her to make.It had started with the rebrand research.Two weeks of deep work on Verdant had given her something Viktor hadn’t counted on. She knew the company from the inside out. The field teams, the community partners, the pipeline projects that hadn’t made it into any board presentation because they were too early-stage to impress anyone. And buried in those conversations was a name that kept coming up. Calloway Green. A mid-sized sustainable infrastructure firm, privately held, with deep roots in exactly the communities Verdant served. And an expansion appetite that had never found the right vehicle.She’d called their director on a Tuesday while Rowan was getting coffee.By thursday, she had a meeting.Monday

Chapter 36: The Celebration

The Calloway deal hit the board table on a Thursday morning. Silas presented it while Caelum sat beside Arwen and said almost nothing, because the numbers said everything that needed saying. The three board members Viktor had been quietly courting went silent one by one as the valuation figures sank in. By the time Silas reached the final page, even Marcelline had uncrossed her arms. The vote to ratify the partnership was unanimous. Afterward, in the corridor outside the boardroom, Caelum stopped walking, turned to her, and looked at her for a long moment like he was still working out exactly what she was made of. “I want you in every strategy meeting from now on,” he said. “Starting Monday.” “I already have the Verdant integration call Monday morning.” “After that.” He started walking again. “Clear your afternoon.” She bit back a smile and followed him.Marcelline caught her before lunch. She was coming out of the office with her phone in her hand when Caelum’s mother appeared

Chapter 37: The Ghost Returns

She woke up to an empty bed and the smell of coffee.Caelum had been up before her most mornings this week. She’d come downstairs to find him on a call in his office or at the kitchen counter reading through documents. And when she walked in he’d look up the way he always did, like she was the first good thing he’d seen all day.She was getting used to it.That was the part that scared her most.She padded downstairs in her socks to find him at the kitchen counter with his phone to his ear and a coffee already poured for her, set exactly where she always sat. He pointed at it without interrupting his call and she sat down and wrapped both hands around the mug and watched him over the rim.He was planning something.She could tell by the way he’d been slightly too composed for the last two days. Caelum Ravencroft when he was working through a normal problem was focused and direct. Caelum Ravencroft when he was planning something he hadn’t told her yet had a specific quality of careful

Chapter 38: The Descent

She didn’t tell Caelum. She couldn't tell him.She just sat with that decision through lunch, through an afternoon Verdant call she barely heard half of, through dinner where he talked about the board’s response to the Calloway ratification and she smiled and nodded and said the right things at the right times. She'd been doing that her whole life.But underneath all of it, the only think she could think about was a green silk scarf and a voice on the burner phone she hadn’t heard in months.Isolde was close... really close. That was the part she couldn’t move past, not the call itself, not even the threat sitting in it, but the specific knowledge behind them. The light — a very small, private, detail that nobody inside this estate would think to mention to anyone because it wasn’t remarkable enough to notice unless you were paying very careful attention.Arwen started noticing things she hadn’t noticed before.The housekeeper who always seemed to be in the corridor near her office wh

Chapter 39: The Perfect Day

The glass house looked exactly the same.Same cliff, same ocean stretching out to the horizon and same quiet that seemed to only exist here.Arwen stood at the window while Caelum carried their bags in and just let herself breathe for the first time in a week.No burner phone. No green scarf sitting in her desk drawer back at the estate. No voice on the other end of a line.Just the ocean, the light and the horizon.“It's a beautiful view.” Arwen said.“It is.” Caelum said from behind her.She exhaled loudly. “I could stay here forever, you know. Just listening to the sound of the water.” She smiled. “It's so peaceful.”He set the bags down and came to stand beside her. “But the last time you stood there, it looked like that you were carrying something heavy.”“Well, I’m not carrying anything right now.”“Good.” He put his arm around her shoulder and pressed a kiss to her temple. “Keep it that way until Monday.”She leaned into him and decided to let herself have this.-----Later tha

Chapter 40: The Discovery

Arwen’s heart almost jumped out of her chest.Do you know which one this would have been? The question kept replaying in her mind.“Lost,” she said. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “A lot of my childhood photos got lost when we moved. My mother wasn’t as careful with mine as she was with Isolde’s.”He looked at her for a moment. “That’s awful.”“It’s fine.” She turned her wine glass. “It was a long time ago.”He accepted it and turned the page. She took a breath of relief.They moved inside as the dark settled properly, the album open on the coffee table between them, the lamp throwing warm light across everything. It should have felt safe: the ring on her finger and the weekend stretched out ahead of them.But now something subtle had shifted in him, and she could feel it.She sat beside him with her wine going warm in her hand and watched him turn pages through Isolde’s documented life.Birthday parties. School events. Summer trips. Isolde at twelve, at fifteen, at s

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