All Chapters of His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

Chapter 192MARCUS"Or," Robert said, "the shot was for show. And the extraction was always the plan."I looked at him."The live stream," Robert said. "Hundreds of cameras. Everything going out in real time. If you shoot someone on a live stream and take them away, you've made a statement. Not just to the target. To everyone watching.""A message," Thomas said."A message to whoever might be considering—whatever the thing is that Damien was apparently supposed to be doing," Robert said.I sat with that.Robert was not wrong.I pressed both hands over my face briefly."The police," Thomas said. "They want to talk to family and friends. They're setting up interviews. We should go—even if it's just to support Adriana, we should be there.""Yes," I said. "We should go.""Do you know anything that you can tell them?" Thomas said. "About who might have—""No," I said.Thomas and Robert looked at each other."Marcus," Thomas said."I said no," I said. "And I mean it. There are things that i

Chapter 194ADRIAThe police took our statements in a conference room on the second floor of St. Catherine's.Separate rooms, separate officers, the standard procedure of people who wanted to compare accounts without the accounts having the opportunity to compare themselves first. I had been through this kind of thing before—not as Adriana Chen, but in contexts that were adjacent to law enforcement in ways I had never discussed with anyone outside my family. I knew how to give a statement that was accurate in all verifiable details and contained nothing that would create problems in directions I couldn't control.I told them about the call from Kieran. The drive to the hospital. Arriving to find that Kieran and Penny had not yet arrived. Watching the footage on the television in the maternity waiting area. The shot, and the vehicle, and the direction it went.I told them I did not know who had taken my husband.This was technically true, in the sense that I did not have confirmed iden

Chapter 196ADRIA"I told you," Marcus said."You told me what you think I want to hear," she said. "Which is not the same thing." A pause. "It was what he told you it was," Marcus said. "A strategic arrangement. The certificate exists but the substance behind it—no.""Good," Valentina said. "That simplifies things."My mother was looking at me.I did not look back at my mother."She doesn't have standing to make demands about access," Valentina continued. "She hasn't been recognized by the family. In terms of our processes, she's not relevant.""She's his wife," Marcus said."She's a document," Valentina said."Val—""Marcus. I like you. I've always liked you. You've been good for Damien in terms of keeping him—" She paused. "Human. That is not a small thing in our context." Another pause. "But Adriana Chen is not someone we need to factor into the current process. When it's resolved, he'll come back, Mila will be present, and whatever needs to be handled regarding the Chen arrangem

Chapter 198ADRIA"Don't apologize," Darren said.I looked at him through my fingers.He looked young in that moment. Younger than his face suggested. Like something in him hadn't caught up to the rest of him yet, some part still soft in a place that should have hardened over by now, if he'd grown up anything like Damien had grown up, in the world Damien had come from."I need to see him," I said. One more time. Because if I stopped asking, it would mean I'd accepted the answer, and I wasn't ready to accept it, not with cameras rolling in my chest and my heart doing something arrhythmic and desperate."You can't," Valentina said."Why not.""Because he's not available," she said again, the same words, the same flat register, but this time something underneath it had shifted, some small crack of her own that she covered fast, professionally, the way I covered mine. "That's the only answer I have for you right now.""Is he hurt?" I said. "Is he — please, just tell me if he's hurt. I saw

Chapter 200DARREN "She said something," I said instead, changing direction slightly, because I wasn't ready to hand over the calculation detail yet, not until I understood what to do with it myself. "About making his coffee every morning. Two sugars, splash of milk. Standing in the kitchen not knowing what to do with her hands.""That's a very specific detail to invent," Valentina said."Yeah," I said. "It is.""Which either means it's true," she said, "or it means she's good enough to know that specificity reads as truth even when it isn't.""You don't trust anything," I said."I trust very little," she said. "It's kept me alive longer than trust would have."I looked at her for a moment — my sister, twenty-nine years old and already talking like someone twice that age, someone who'd had the softness burned out of her early and had decided, somewhere along the way, that the burning had been a favor. I loved her. I didn't always like the version of her that the family had made, but