All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride: Chapter 91 - Chapter 95

POV: Lena Moretti Julian's sentencing was three weeks after Victor's verdict. A separate proceeding. Different courtroom. Different judge. Smaller gallery because Julian's case didn't carry the same public weight as his father's. Victor was the architect. Julian was the instrument. The media covered the sentencing but without the frenzy that had surrounded the main trial. A secondary story. A footnote to the larger narrative. I almost didn't go. I sat at the kitchen table that morning with Sera in my lap and a cup of tea going cold beside my laptop and debated whether watching Julian receive his sentence would give me anything I needed. Closure. Satisfaction. Justice. The words people use when they talk about the end of legal proceedings, as if hearing a judge announce a number of years could repair the specific damage of a man's hand on your arm and his body pressing you into a wall and the sound of fabric tearing. I went because not going felt like avoidance. And I was done avoid

POV: Lena Moretti Hana left Paul on a Tuesday. She called me from the road. Her voice was shaking so badly that I could barely understand the first three words. "I'm in the car," she said. "I'm driving. I don't know where I'm going. I just got in the car and I drove." She'd waited until Paul was at work. Packed one bag. Left the house in Connecticut that she hadn't left in three years. Got in the car whose odometer Paul checked every Tuesday afternoon when he came home. And drove. No destination. No plan. Just the act of leaving. The physical motion of a body passing through a doorway that had been a boundary for years and discovering that the other side existed and was real and contained air she could breathe. "Pull over at the next gas station," I told her. Calm. The same voice I used when directing case logistics and coordinating witness preparation. The voice that said I know what to do even when I'm figuring it out in real time. "I'll send you an address. Naomi has a contact i

POV: Lena Moretti I wrote the vows on a Saturday morning while Sera napped and the house was quiet. Not on a laptop. By hand. On a piece of paper from the same pad I'd used to draw the web diagram with my mother's name at the center months ago. Different words this time. Different map. Instead of lines connecting crimes and victims and conspiracies, I was drawing lines between two people and trying to find the language for what those lines meant. The first marriage had been a contract signed in darkness. Shaking hands. Blood on my scalp. A man I'd known for less than an hour offering me a door that wasn't locked and me walking through it because the alternative was Julian. There were no vows. No ceremony. No promises beyond the transactional terms of a deal designed to serve his revenge and my survival. We'd stood in a study in the east wing and I'd signed my name next to his and that was it. A legal formality. A strategic arrangement. The beginning of everything that came after, bo