All Chapters of His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Chapter 92: Shoot OutADRIA I ran.Not toward Yusuf's car. Not toward the store entrance—too slow, too direct, she'd have a clear line. I ran left, along the front of the building, toward the corner where the parking structure connected to the main store, because the structure had walls and levels and corners and I could work with corners.I heard the shot.It was loud. Louder than I expected even knowing it was coming. And wide—I heard it go wide, somewhere behind me, the crack of it and then the sound of something impacting the concrete of the building facade about ten feet from where I'd been standing.She was scared. Scared people shot wide.I reached the corner of the building and turned it and there were stairs—external stairs connecting the parking structure levels, exposed concrete, metal railing. I went for them because up was better than lateral in a pursuit with limited cover options, more angles, more potential exits at the top.I went up the first flight.The heel caught

Chapter 94: Secured Prisoner ADRIAI didn't know about the footage until Elijah called.This was later—after the stairwell, after Damien had carried me across the parking lot with the focused unhurried care of a man who had decided this was what he was doing and was not going to be rushed out of it. After the police had secured Adina, who was still crying, who looked nothing like the composed, aggressive woman from the grocery store. After Yusuf had appeared from somewhere with a blanket that he'd put around my shoulders with the expression of a man conducting a formal apology through the medium of a blanket.After all of that, I was sitting on the low concrete barrier at the edge of the parking lot with Damien beside me, his arm around my shoulders, and I was doing the thing I had apparently started doing at some point in the last four days, which was pressing my face into his chest and letting him be the wall between me and whatever was happening around us.This was not operational

Chapter 96: Yusuf Apology ADRIA I stared at the ceiling of the ambulance as it started moving and did not think about the cameras that had been running the entire time. I thought about the pressure of his hand and the twenty minutes I had to wait and the ankle that was going to be complicated and the fact that somewhere out in the world the footage was moving at a speed that Elijah had said was faster than anything else this week.I thought about all of that from a very great distance.---Elijah called again when I was in the imaging room.I'd asked the technician for thirty seconds and she'd been kind about it. I answered with one hand while the other lay flat on the table."I need you to know some numbers," Elijah said. He didn't say hello. He understood that I was somewhere busy."Tell me.""The main compilation clip is at two point one million views. That's in forty minutes." A pause. "The specific clip of him carrying you out of the stairwell is separate. Someone isolated it.

Chapter 98 Complicated Feelings ADRIAThe hospital discharged me at four thirty in the afternoon.Sprained ankle, wrapped firmly, instructions about elevation and ice and not doing things that would aggravate it, which I planned to follow for exactly as long as it was convenient and then reassess. Damien's stitches had been checked and declared intact, which he received as confirmation that everything was fine and I received as relief that I kept to myself.We were waiting for Yusuf to bring the car around.This was the specific, transitional quiet of the end of a medical event—the paperwork done, the discharge instructions received, the immediate crisis resolved, and nothing yet to fill the space that the crisis had been occupying. Damien was sitting beside me on the edge of the discharge area seat, closer than he needed to be given the available space, and I was not examining why I hadn't moved to create more distance.The ankle throbbed. I was managing it."You should have the ele

Chapter 100: The Hospital ClipADRIA"Someone's going to have to explain to me," Marcus said, into the new quiet, "who keeps getting this on camera. Because it's been—" He held up his phone. The notification light was practically strobing. "It's been approximately forty minutes since the hospital and people are already commenting.""What?" I said."The parking lot cameras," Damien said, with the resignation of a man who had accepted a fact."The parking lot cameras were from before," Marcus said. "This is new." He turned his phone around.Someone had filmed through the hospital window. The discharge waiting area had large windows facing the parking access road, and someone—a passerby, someone in a car, someone with a phone and an angle—had filmed through the glass. The footage was distant and slightly blurred by the window, but it showed two people in a waiting area, shoulder to shoulder, one with a wrapped ankle. And it showed the moment where the person with the wrapped ankle had pr