All Chapters of Bred for Betrayal : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

POV: Nora I moved from the bathroom to the bedroom closet in the four seconds between hearing Jade's heels cross the living room and reach the hallway. It was the only option. The bathroom had no lock on the inside worth anything, and if she opened that door I had nowhere to go and no explanation that would hold. The closet was deeper, fuller, the kind that accumulates enough clothing to provide actual cover if a person pressed themselves back far enough and didn't breathe wrong. I pressed back as far as I could go and pulled the door to within an inch of closed. Jade came into the bedroom. I heard her drop her bag on the bed, heard the specific sound of someone kicking off heels, one then the other. She moved around the room in the pattern of someone running through a familiar routine. The bedside table opened and closed, which meant she'd checked it and the contents looked undisturbed. I'd been careful about that. I had been very careful about that. She went into the bathroom.

POV: Nora I never got to see the footage from the study. Elias's phone rang before he could pull it up, and the call lasted long enough that by the time he came back to the table his attention had shifted entirely. Something had moved in the legal case, a filing Marcus's team had submitted that needed a response before morning. We spent the next three hours on that and the study footage stayed closed on the laptop between us like something we'd agreed without speaking to leave alone for now. I thought about it after he left. What Marcus had said about me on a call six weeks ago, in a room where he believed no one was listening. Elias had described it as not what a man says about a transaction he's already closed, and then said nothing further, and I had let him leave without pressing because I wasn't sure I was ready for the answer. That was a problem I was developing. Knowing when I was avoiding things because they were tactically irrelevant and when I was avoiding them because I

POV: Nora I called Elias back within the hour. Not because of the kiss, I told myself. Because of the message. Because someone had been watching the lobby and had footage and was now holding it as a threat, and that was an operational problem that required an immediate response regardless of everything else. He picked up on the first ring. "I got a message," I said. "Someone has lobby footage." Silence for two seconds. "Forward it to me." I did. He called back four minutes later. "The camera covering that angle was accessed remotely at some point in the last forty-eight hours. Someone cloned the feed." His voice was controlled. "I'm coming back." He arrived in twenty minutes. We sat at the table and worked through the security breach methodically, traced the access point, identified the gap, closed it. It took two hours and neither of us mentioned what had happened before he left. The work required full attention and full attention was easier than the alternative. By the time

POV: Nora I sat with what she'd said about Elias for a long moment. Twice as a witness. Once as a suspect. I didn't let it show on my face because I had been practicing not letting things show on my face for months and I was getting competent at it. But underneath the practiced neutrality I was doing the rapid, uncomfortable work of reassessing a foundation I had built a significant amount of weight on. "Tell me about the suspect angle," I said. Chen's expression didn't change. She'd expected the question. "Elias Vance was connected to your father professionally for over a decade. When William died, Elias was one of the last people to have contact with him. Phone records show a call between them the night before the death, forty minutes long." She kept her voice level. "He was interviewed once, briefly, before the case was closed. His answers were cooperative and vague in equal measure. The kind of vague that's hard to challenge directly." "That makes him a person of interest, n

POV: Nora Jade left. Not dramatically, not with words. She simply looked at Marcus standing in the doorway, then at me, then made the calculation that whatever was about to happen was not a conversation she needed to be part of. She picked up her bag from the terrace railing, said nothing to either of us, and walked past Marcus through the door without touching him. He watched her go. Then he looked back at me. The shock was still present in his face, not fully processed, the particular expression of someone whose controlled environment has just produced something they didn't account for. I had planned for this moment across three days of preparation. I knew what I wanted from it and I knew how to move through it. The wire was warm against my ribs and Chen was somewhere in a car two streets away listening to every word. I let him look. The hair was darker, a professional job done four days ago, close enough to my natural color to seem intentional rather than disguised. The makeu