Inicio / Romance / Tempted by my brother-in-law. / Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

Todos los capítulos de Tempted by my brother-in-law. : Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

117 Capítulos

LENA

LENA POV: Hazel My mother's voice was the same. Eleven years and it was the same. The specific cadence of it, the way she clipped the end of certain words, the slight pause before she said something important. I had forgotten I remembered it so well until I heard it and then it was like something unlocked in my chest that I had not known was locked. I sat down on the bed. Nikolai stayed standing by the door and did not move and I was grateful for it. "Tell me," I said. "Scott is a middleman," she said. "He has always been a middleman. He controls the club and the network and he holds the leverage on the people inside that house but he does not own any of it. Someone else owns it. Someone who built the whole structure twenty years ago and has been running it from outside the family." "Who," I said. "His name is Reeve," she said. "Conrad Reeve. He does not appear in any of the family's public documentation. He was your father in law's business partner before the Varyn e

SIXTEEN

SIXTEEN POV: Nikolai We moved through the back corridor fast. Hazel was ahead of me and I let her lead because she knew this house better than I did in the ways that mattered, the staff patterns, the rooms that were used at this hour, the doors that stuck and the ones that opened silently. She had spent a year learning the architecture of a house that had never fully let her in and now that knowledge was the most useful thing in the building. We reached the east wing door at seven forty four. She pushed it open and we went through and the east wing was quiet and dim, curtains still drawn, the particular stillness of a part of the house that did not wake early. Vera's private sitting room was at the end of the corridor. We were halfway down it when I heard something. I put my hand on Hazel's arm and she stopped immediately. We both stood still and listened. Movement. Ahead of us. Inside Vera's sitting room. Someone was already there. I looked at Hazel. She looked a

NINE

NINE POV: Hazel The meeting room was on the ground floor. Large table. Eight chairs. A window that looked out onto the front drive so you could see cars arriving, which I had always thought was a design choice that said something about the family that lived here. Always watching who was coming. I was the first one in. I chose my seat deliberately. Not at the end, which would look like a challenge. Not in the middle, which would look like I was trying to disappear. Third from the left, with my back to the wall and a clear line to the door. I set my phone face down on the table and my hands in my lap and I breathed. Kaden came in at eight fifty two. He looked at me when he sat down and the look said he knew everything I knew and was ready and that was all it needed to say. We did not speak. Isabella was two minutes behind him, precise and groomed in the way she always was, the specific armour of a woman who had decided that appearance was its own form of control. She look

REEVE

REEVE POV: Nikolai The room held its breath for about four seconds after Hazel said it. Scott's face did the thing I had been watching for since he walked in, the thing underneath the pleasantness finally surfacing, not anger exactly, more like the recalibration of a man who had just discovered that the board he thought he was playing on was not the board he was actually playing on. His hand was still flat on the folder and his eyes were on Hazel and she looked back at him with the specific steadiness of someone who had been waiting a long time to be in exactly this position. Isabella was looking between them with an expression that had shifted from satisfied to uncertain, which was a thing I had never seen on her face before and which told me she had not been told about Reeve, that Scott had kept that particular layer entirely to himself, that the woman who believed she was running the operational side of this family had been running exactly what Scott allowed her to run and n

SABLE

SABLE POV: Nikolai I left the meeting room at nine twenty two. Not because it was over. It was not over. Kaden was still talking, laying out the financial chain with the methodical patience of a man who had rehearsed it for three years, and Vera was sitting at the end of the table with her hands folded and her eyes on Scott and Isabella had not moved or spoken since Scott told her they had used each other. The room still had hours left in it and lawyers to come and calls to make and the long grinding machinery of consequence that follows a thing like this. But Scott had said Sable's name and I could not sit in that room with that information and do nothing with it. I walked out and no one stopped me. Hazel's eyes followed me to the door. I did not look back. I went to my room and called Sable and he picked up on the first ring, which was the first wrong thing, because Sable never picked up on the first ring. He was a man who made you wait as a matter of principle, who treated t

ADDRESS

ADDRESSPOV: HazelThe meeting broke at ten fifteen.Not cleanly. Nothing about it was clean. It dissolved the way things dissolve when the structure holding them together stops being structure and becomes just a collection of people in a room who no longer have the same story. Scott stopped talking at some point and started listening and that shift alone said more than anything he had said out loud. Isabella left first, standing up without a word and walking out with the specific rigidity of a woman holding herself together through sheer force of habit. Kaden watched her go and did not follow.Vera asked staff to bring tea.I sat at the table while the room rearranged itself around me and thought about Nikolai, who had walked out forty minutes ago and had not come back.Kaden sat down beside me.He had never done that before. In a year of marriage he had sat across from me or at a distance or not at all and now he pulled out the chair next to mine and sat in it and put his hands flat

FATHER

FATHERPOV: HazelMy mother said it the way she said most hard things, quietly, with the particular flatness of someone who had been carrying a piece of information for so long it had stopped feeling like a bomb and started feeling like furniture. Just something that lived in the room with her. Just a thing she had always known was going to have to be said eventually.I sat down on the floor of Nikolai's room.Not the bed, not the chair. The floor, because my legs made the decision and the floor was what was available."Tell me," I said.She was quiet for a moment."Your father worked for Reeve," she said. "Before you were born and for six years after. He was not a bad man. I want you to understand that first. He was a man who got into something that grew past what he could manage and by the time he understood what Reeve actually was, he was already in deep enough that getting out had a cost.""What cost," I said."Us," she said. "Reeve told him that if he stayed, we were safe. If he

SAY IT

SAY ITPOV: NikolaiShe looked at me from the doorway.The room was quiet and the morning was still sitting in the air between us, all of it, the meeting and Scott's face and the photograph on the table and the phone call with her mother and everything that had been said and decided in the last three hours. It was all still there and she was standing in the doorway about to say something and I was watching her the way I always watched her, with the specific attention of a man who had stopped pretending he could look away."You stayed," she said. "After the ball. After the bench. After every point where the sensible thing was to put distance between us, you stayed. And I do not think it was because of the map or the family or any of the reasons that would have made sense." She paused. "I think it was because you wanted to. And I think that is the thing you have been trying to find the right moment to say."I looked at her."That is part of it," I said."What is the other part," she sai

LENA

LENAPOV: HazelI called her from the car.Kaden was driving and Nikolai was in the passenger seat and I was in the back with my phone pressed to my ear and the city moving past the windows and the question Kaden had asked in the entrance hall still sitting in my chest like something I had swallowed wrong.She answered on the second ring."We are twenty minutes out," I said. "But I need to ask you something first.""Hazel," she said."Your name before you married Dad," I said. "What was it."The silence that followed was three seconds long and told me everything before she said a word. Three seconds is nothing in a normal conversation. In this one it was a complete answer."Lena Reeve," she said.I closed my eyes.Kaden's hands were steady on the wheel. Nikolai was looking at the road ahead and not at me and I was grateful for both of those things because I needed a moment that belonged only to me and the information rearranging itself inside my head.Conrad Reeve was my mother's fami

ALONE

ALONEPOV: NikolaiHazel was not going in alone.I said it once, in the car, without turning around, and the way I said it closed the conversation before it opened. Kaden glanced at me from the driver's seat and said nothing, which meant he agreed, and Hazel was quiet in the back for a moment and then she said fine, which did not mean she had stopped thinking about it.She had not stopped thinking about it.I could tell by the quality of her silence for the remaining ten minutes to her mother's address. The specific silence of a woman running calculations and not sharing them, which I had learned to recognise in the same way I had learned to recognise everything about her, by paying attention whether I meant to or not.We pulled up to a residential street in the north of the city at eleven forty.The buildings were narrow and close together, the kind of street where everyone knew their neighbours by sound if not by name. Kaden stopped the car and we sat for a moment and then Hazel sai

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