All Chapters of His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

Chapter 202ADRIAThe room went quiet.My mother came back in with the teapot refilled, because my mother's answer to almost anything was more tea, and set it down without comment, though I could see her listening."That's the risk," she said, finally, sitting across from me. "Not that you'll be caught performing. That you'll stop performing and not notice the difference. Performance has an edge to it, even when it's very good — a place where the actor is still standing behind the character, watching. If you lose that edge, you're not protecting yourself anymore. You're just living the grief, unfiltered, in a house full of people who are actively looking for reasons to suspect you.""I know," I said."Then know it properly," she said. Sharper than her usual register, which made all of us look up. "You are not just performing for Valentina and Darren. You are performing for cameras Elijah doesn't control, for staff who report to p

Chapter 204DARREN He walked me sideways, angling his body between me and the cameras, the same instinct I'd seen Damien use a hundred times without ever once acknowledging it out loud — the specific, practiced choreography of a man who knew exactly how to move a woman through a crowd of people who wanted a piece of her. I let him steer me. My legs were moving because he was moving them, half a step behind his pace, my mind still somewhere back at the podium replaying the woman's scream.*You killed him.**You wanted his money.*I hadn't. I hadn't wanted any of it, not like that, not ever, and the accusation sat in my chest like something with edges, cutting in a place I hadn't braced for.Valentina's voice reached us as we cleared the last of the crowd, wrapping up the conference with the smooth, practiced ease of someone who had clearly handled worse. I didn't hear what she said. I was already at the car, Darren opening the door fo

Chapter 206KIERANThe hospital had discharged me two days after they'd stitched my ribs and given me something for the concussion, and I'd gone home to an apartment that felt too large and too quiet, and I had not, in any real sense, stopped moving since.Not physically. Physically I was doing the opposite — sitting, mostly, in the armchair by the window with my laptop balanced on my knees and my phone within reach, because I had discovered, somewhere in the last five days, that if I stopped moving in the other sense, the sense that mattered, the guilt found me immediately and settled in like it had been waiting.Penny was two rooms away, asleep, finally, after a night that hadn't gone well — the baby, Theo, we'd named him Theo, though I wasn't sure whose decision that had technically been, had cried for four hours straight starting at midnight, and Penny's body was still healing from an incision closed on a road with a kit that had no business b

 Chapter 208KIERANSomething cold moved through me. Not metaphorically. An actual, physical cold, starting at the base of my skull and running down through my spine, and my hands had gone numb on the laptop, and I was aware, distantly, that I was still sitting in my armchair in my apartment with the video paused on the screen, and I was also, somehow, somewhere else entirely.Concrete. I could smell it — the specific mineral dampness of concrete that had never seen sun, mixed with something metallic underneath it, something I didn't want to name.A warehouse. High ceiling, lost in shadow above me, the kind of space built for storage and never intended for anyone to linger in.Pain arrived before the picture fully resolved — a white, total pain that didn't have a location, that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and underneath it, a scream. Not mine. Someone else's, high and terrified, cutting through whatever this was with a spec

Chapter 210ADRIA"Let go of her."The voice cut across the aisle like something physical.Isla turned, and I turned with her, my arm still caught in her grip, and Darren was there — I hadn't heard him arrive, hadn't clocked a car pulling up outside, and some distant part of me registered that this was concerning in its own right, that he had gotten close enough to hear the last thirty seconds of that conversation without my noticing — standing at the end of the aisle with an expression that had none of the softness I'd started, against my better judgment, to associate with him."This isn't your business," Isla said, not releasing me."I said let go of her." He was already moving, closing the distance in that same economical, trained stride I'd watched him use at the press conference, and there was nothing careless in it now, nothing boyish. "Last warning.""I'm a journalist conducting—""You're assaulting a griev