บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

POV: Lena Moretti The house looked smaller than I remembered. Or maybe I'd gotten bigger. Not physically, not yet, but in every other way that matters. The woman who'd left this house for a rehearsal dinner six weeks ago was a different person from the one standing on the porch now with a suitcase and no plan. That woman had been numb and compliant and ready to marry a man she didn't love because her father told her she had to. This woman had mapped criminal networks, testified at arbitration hearings, and walked out on a billionaire. Growth looks different on everyone. The front door was unlocked. It was always unlocked because Marco couldn't remember to lock it and didn't care enough to try. I stepped inside and the smell hit me first. Stale alcohol and old food and the particular mustiness of a house where the windows hadn't been opened in weeks. The carpet was stained in new places. The kitchen sink was full. A stack of mail on the hallway table had grown into a small mountain o

POV: Lena Moretti I didn't find out what Gianna had done until it was too late. By then the damage was already spreading through channels I couldn't see and reaching people I couldn't stop. But I should have known. I should have remembered that the house I'd retreated to wasn't a safe house. It was a sieve. And my stepsister had been straining information through it since the day I married the wrong brother. Gianna was subtle about it. I'll give her that. She'd learned from the first visit to The Obsidian, where I'd spotted her probing immediately and shut her down. This time she didn't probe. She just watched. Quietly. From the edges. The way a predator watches from tall grass, patient and still and waiting for the prey to reveal its weakness through routine rather than confrontation. She watched me come back to the house with a suitcase and no husband. She watched me spend hours in my room with my laptop, emerging only for food and bathroom trips. She watched me avoid coffee, whi

POV: Lena Moretti The realization hit me on a Wednesday morning while I was throwing up crackers in the bathroom. Gianna's door was closed but I could hear her moving behind it. Awake earlier than usual. Listening, maybe. Cataloging the sound of my retching the way she cataloged everything else about my presence in this house. And suddenly, with absolute clarity, I understood that I couldn't stay here another day. Gianna was reporting to Julian. Julian was smart enough to figure out the pregnancy from behavioral observations alone. And Julian with knowledge of a Crane heir growing inside me was the most dangerous version of Julian I could imagine. He would move legally. Custody claims. Paternal rights filed on behalf of the Crane family. The blood debt clause about descendants weaponized in a family court. He'd build a case that I was living in an unstable environment with an alcoholic father and no income. He'd argue that the child deserved the resources and stability of the Crane

POV: Lena Moretti Naomi delivered the package at midnight. A padded envelope left inside the mailbox at the end of the driveway. No knock. No visit. Just the quiet professionalism of a woman who understood that the fewer people who saw her near this house, the cleaner the disappearance would be. Inside the envelope: a driver's license with my photograph and a name that wasn't mine. Sarah Collins. Brown hair, brown eyes, five foot six. The photo was recent, taken at the discreet doctor's appointment Naomi had arranged. I looked tired in it. Appropriate for a fake identity. Nobody questions a tired woman. A prepaid phone with one number stored in the contacts, Naomi's encrypted line. An envelope of cash, thick enough to make my hand shake when I counted it. Twelve thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties. Six months of modest living if I was careful. And a set of car keys for a vehicle that Naomi had arranged through channels I didn't ask about, parked two blocks north. I packed at t

POV: Lena Moretti I heard about what happened from Naomi. She called me three days after I arrived in Cambria, her voice carrying the particular strain of someone delivering news they wish they didn't have. I sat on the cottage porch with the ocean in front of me and listened to her describe the destruction of a man I'd left behind. Ezra found out I was gone on Thursday. Not because Naomi told him. Because he called my regular phone and it was disconnected. The number I'd left behind when I picked up the prepaid. He tried the phone six times in an hour, each call going to a dead line, before driving to my father's house at ten in the morning with Dominic in the car and a look on his face that Naomi described as "empty in a way that scared me more than his anger." Marco answered the door in his bathrobe. Unshaved. Smelling like yesterday's whiskey and this morning's regret. Ezra asked where I was. Marco said I'd left. Didn't know where. Didn't know when exactly. Found the note in th