All Chapters of His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress: Chapter 231 - Chapter 240

Chapter 231ADRIAThe house was quiet when we pulled in — no lights on in the front rooms, which meant Valentina was either still at the search or had finished and retreated somewhere upstairs, and I felt a small, ungenerous relief at the thought of not having to arrange my face for her yet.Darren didn't get out of the car right away.I sat there beside him, the engine ticking as it cooled, the two of us saying nothing, and I felt the exhaustion of the last hour settle into me all at once — not the manageable kind, not the kind I could push through with the specific discipline I'd built my whole adult life around, but something heavier. Something that had been accumulating for weeks and had apparently decided, watching Kieran go white on a street corner, watching his hands start to shake, watching Darren pin him to the pavement while a crowd of strangers cheered for it, that today was the day it finally caught up with me.I thought about

Chapter 233DARRENI stared at the number for a long time before I dialed it.Adria had gone quiet beside me in the car, her hands folded in her lap, that same careful, smaller version of herself she'd folded back into after the anger left her. I hadn't said anything else since she'd asked. I didn't trust myself to say anything else without either backing out of it or making it worse.I dialed.It rang twice before it connected, no greeting, just the immediate flat click of a line opening onto someone who already knew who was calling."Mr. Castellan." The handler's voice. Clipped. Already tired of me before I'd said a word. "This is becoming a habit.""I need ten minutes," I said. "With Damien. Now, tonight, not scheduled through whatever process you've got running.""That's not how this works," he said. "You know that's not how this works. There's a protocol for family contact, and it doesn't run through late-night phone calls to my personal line.""I'm aware of the protocol," I said

Chapter 235DAMIENThey brought the phone to me the way they brought everything now — without warning, without context, a hand appearing out of the dark and pressing something cold and solid into my palm before I'd fully understood what it was."Ten minutes," a voice said, flat, unfamiliar. "Family business. Don't waste it."I held the thing in my hand for a long moment before I understood it was a phone.My first thought wasn't hope. I want to be honest about that, even now, even looking back at it — my first thought was suspicion, cold and immediate, the specific trained response of a man who had spent however many days learning that nothing arrived in this room without a purpose attached to it, and the purpose was never kindness.*Another technique.*That was the phrase that surfaced first, clear and cold, cutting through whatever fog the drugs had left behind. They had already taken so much from me in ways I couldn't fully catalogue anymore — the curtains, the mat's colors, whole

Chapter 237VALENTINAI have searched forty-one houses in my life.I keep the number precisely, the way I keep most numbers that matter. Forty-one houses, forty-one lives disassembled and reassembled with enough care that their owners never knew the difference, and I had learned, somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth, that the things people hide badly are rarely the things that matter. I started with the obvious rooms first. The bedroom. The dressing room, which Adria had apparently claimed as her own space within a week of moving back in, small personal touches already accumulating on the vanity — a hairbrush, a jar of something that smelled like vanilla, a single earring without its pair sitting loose in a dish, the kind of domestic clutter that either meant nothing or meant everything, depending entirely on whether it had been placed there deliberately to read as ordinary.I went through the wardrobe first. Nothing beneath the false bottom I checked out of habit rather than

Chapter 239DAMIENThey came back faster this time.I hadn't finished processing the call before the door opened again — no rest period, no dark stretch to recover in, just the abrupt reappearance of light and hands and the specific cold efficiency of people who had decided, somewhere beyond this room, that something about me needed correcting."His pulse spiked during contact," a voice said. Not to me. Over me, the way you'd discuss a malfunctioning piece of equipment in front of the equipment itself, assuming it had no capacity to understand what was being said about it. "Elevated for six minutes post-call. Resistance markers up eleven percent from baseline.""That's the wrong direction," another voice said."I'm aware.""Adjust the compound."I understood, somewhere underneath the fog that had already started creeping back in, that they were talking about mercy in reverse. That the call I'd been given — whatever accident of family leverage had bought me those ninety seconds of her