All Chapters of Tempted by my brother-in-law. : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

WEDNESDAYPOV: NikolaiMy mother called at noon.Not Isabella. My actual mother, which was a distinction that required a moment every time because Isabella was the woman who had raised me and the word still carried her shape even now.I picked up because I had not spoken to her since the charge."Nikolai," she said."Yes," I said."I want to see Kaden," she said. "Today if possible. The facility will allow a visit this afternoon.""I will tell him," I said."I would also like to see you," she said. "If you are willing."I sat with that for a moment.Isabella in a facility having been formally charged. Asking to see her sons. The specific quality of a woman who had operated from a position of complete control for thirty years and was now in a room she could not leave until someone unlocked the door."Yes," I said. "Alright.""Thank you," she said. And she said it simply, without the management, without the specific warmth she deployed when she wanted something. Just two words that land

LISBONPOV: HazelWe left at six in the morning.The house was quiet and the city was in its early configuration and I put my bag in the car and looked at the estate one more time before I got in, the lit windows and the gate and the specific shape of a building I had arrived at a year ago with two goals and nothing else.I had found my mother.I was leaving with considerably more than I arrived with and considerably less certainty about what came next and that ratio felt right.My mother was at the door.She had Iris on her hip in the specific way she always had her, one arm under her and the other free, and Iris was awake and looking at the car with the wide assessment she gave everything new.I went back and kissed my mother and she held my face for a second and let go."Call me when you land," she said."Yes," I said."And when you get to the hotel," she said."Mum," I said."And if anything happens," she said."Nothing is going to happen," I said."I know," she said. "Call me any

MIKHAILPOV: NikolaiI stood on the ridge for a long time after Vera finished.She told me everything.My father had found out about Cardivance. Not through Elena, not through any of the threads that had unravelled over the last month. He had found out because he had been looking at the family's financial structure ten years ago and he had seen the redirected funds and he had understood what they were connected to and he had gone to Isabella.Not to expose her.To give her the chance to end it.She had not ended it.She had arranged for him to have a cardiac event.It had not worked completely. The dosage or the timing or some specific margin of biology that Vera said the doctors could never fully explain had left him alive when he should not have been. He had woken in a private facility with a doctor who had been paid by Vera rather than by Isabella and he had understood immediately what had happened and what would happen next if he went home.He had called Vera.She had helped him d

MORNINGPOV: HazelWe met him at nine.A café near the workshop, small, the kind of place that had been there long enough to stop trying to be anything other than what it was. Tables outside on a narrow pavement, the morning light coming at an angle between the buildings, the smell of coffee and bread.Mikhail Varyn was already there when we arrived.He was sitting at a table at the end with his hands around a cup and he looked up when we came around the corner and I watched him look at his son first, the specific quality of a father looking at a child he has not been in the same room with for ten years, and then he looked at me.I looked back.He had Nikolai's eyes. Or Nikolai had his. The same quality of attention in them, the same way of looking at something without performing the looking.We sat down.The waiter came and we ordered and nobody said anything significant for the first few minutes because the coffee needed to arrive and the morning needed to be in the room with us bef

FREEPOV: HazelI read it three times.The handwriting was Kaden's. I knew his handwriting from a year of signed documents and formal notes left in the entrance hall and the one card he had given me at the beginning of the marriage that said welcome to the family in his precise even script and nothing else.This was his handwriting.The marriage was annulled this afternoon. You are free.I sat with those two sentences.Nikolai was very still beside me."He put it in your phone case," he said."Before we left," I said. "He must have done it before we left. He knew the annulment was moving fast and he put it there for me to find.""He did not call," Nikolai said. "He did not send a message. He wrote it down and put it somewhere he knew you would find it during the one day you were not supposed to be reachable."I looked at the note.Kaden who had said it was just paperwork. Kaden who had told his brother to stop acting like it required justification. Kaden who had come down to breakfast