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Alle Kapitel von Bred for Betrayal : Kapitel 21 – Kapitel 30

64 Kapitel

Chapter 21

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.

Chapter 22

POV: Nora The follow request disappeared by morning. Either whoever sent it deleted it, or it had been a test to see if I was watching. Either way it was gone, and Elias spent two hours trying to trace the account before concluding it had been created and wiped from a device that left nothing useful behind. Professional. Deliberate. The same word kept coming up in his assessment and mine. Jade was placed by someone who knew what they were doing. The more pressing problem was that she now knew someone had been in the apartment. She hadn't called Marcus, Elias had confirmed that by monitoring the call logs we had access to through the bugs. She hadn't called the man from the phone conversation either, not on any number we were tracking. She had, apparently, done nothing. Which was somehow more unsettling than any of the obvious responses. A woman who discovers a breach and goes quiet is a woman who is calculating. I spent the following two days in the apartment going through the p

Chapter 23

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

Chapter 24

POV: Nora The new apartment was on the fourth floor of a building with two separate exits, a doorman who worked twenty-four hours, and a camera covering every corridor. Elias had it ready within three hours of leaving the last place, which told me he'd had it prepared before the situation required it. That was the first thing I filed away. The second was the man he posted outside. Not obviously, not in a uniform. Just someone who was always in the lobby when I came and went, reading a newspaper with the particular stillness of a person who was not actually reading. I didn't say anything for four days. I watched, noted, and said nothing, because four days ago I had been shaken enough by the email and the medical file breach that the security had felt like protection rather than what it actually was. On the fifth day I found the device. It was under the kitchen counter, small, magnetic, attached to the underside of the cabinet where it would survive a casual search without difficu

Chapter 25

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

Chapter 26

POV: Nora I didn't sleep after the email. I forwarded it to Elias at two in the morning and he was awake when it arrived, which told me he hadn't been sleeping either, though neither of us acknowledged that. He responded in four words. *Don't reply. I'll investigate.* I put the phone down and lay in the dark and thought about what it meant that my father had concealed a person. Not money, not documents, not assets. A person who had been looking for me since he died. The prenatal appointment at nine was at a clinic Elias had switched me to three weeks ago, different from the original, different name on the file, a precaution against whoever had accessed my medical records. The midwife was brisk and efficient and the baby's heartbeat on the monitor was strong and steady, which was the only thing in my life that felt uncomplicated. I was outside on the pavement afterward, coat buttoned, working out the walk back, when someone fell into step beside me. "Nora Ashford." Not a question.

Chapter 27

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

Chapter 28

POV: Nora The watch had a false back. I had owned it for two years, had held it a hundred times, and had never known. The back panel released with pressure applied at a specific point along the lower edge, and inside the shallow space behind the mechanism was a folded square of paper so thin it had clearly been cut to fit. A twelve-digit number. Nothing else. I had stared at it for a long time before photographing it and putting it back. An account number was my first thought, but the format was wrong for any standard banking structure I recognized. I sent the photograph to the email address that had contacted me and got no response. Whatever it unlocked, I wasn't meant to access it alone. I hadn't told Elias about the watch's interior. I was still deciding how much that said about the current state of things between us. The gala was on a Friday. Elias had sourced the ticket three weeks before the event, a donation-level entry under the name Claire Marsh, a persona with enough

Chapter 29

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

Chapter 30

POV: Marcus He stayed on the terrace for eleven minutes after she left. He knew the exact count because he had checked his watch when the door closed behind her and checked it again when he finally moved, and the gap between those two moments was something he had no clean explanation for. Eleven minutes standing at a railing looking at a city he owned pieces of, thinking about a woman who had just walked through a room full of people who didn't know her name. She had donated to get in. That was the part that kept returning. Not the hair, not the dress, not the way she'd said Jade's name in that particular tone that had landed like a key turning in a lock he hadn't known was there. The donation. The deliberate, resourced, unhurried act of a person who had found a door and walked through it on her own terms. He had built a picture of Nora Ashford over the months of their arrangement. Practical, contained, intelligent enough to ask the right questions but not positioned to do anythin

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