All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

POV: Lena Moretti He brought me the documents on a Saturday morning. I was at the kitchen table reviewing witness preparation notes for Hana's deposition when he walked in carrying a folder that looked different from the case materials we'd been working with. Thinner. Cleaner. The kind of folder that contains something personal rather than operational. He set it in front of me without speaking. Then he sat in the chair across the table and waited. The same patient waiting he'd been practicing since Cambria. No pressure. No pitch. Just presence and the folder and the understanding that whatever happened next was my decision. I opened it. Inside was a revised marriage contract. Not the original that I'd signed in his study with shaking hands and a bleeding scalp. A new one. Drafted by Dominic, based on the legal formatting and the precise language that only Dominic's particular brand of obsessive lawyering could produce. But the terms were Ezra's. I could tell because they were the o

POV: Lena Moretti She showed up on a Thursday evening. No call. No warning. Just Gianna standing on the brownstone's front steps looking like she hadn't slept in days, pressing the buzzer with the nervous energy of someone who wasn't sure they'd be let inside and was prepared to stand there until the decision was made for them. Naomi flagged her on the security feed before I saw her. "Your stepsister is at the front door. She's alone. No phone visible. No vehicle parked nearby. She walked here." Naomi paused. "She didn't track you. She tracked me. Followed me from a coffee shop this morning. She's been tailing me for two days." Smart. Gianna couldn't find the brownstone by searching for me because the location was buried under layers of corporate obfuscation. But Naomi moved through the city every day, meeting contacts, coordinating security, running the operational logistics of the takedown. Following Naomi meant finding the hub. Gianna had stopped trying to track the hidden woman

POV: Lena Moretti The contractions started at 2 AM on a Tuesday. Three weeks early. I was at the kitchen table finalizing the grand jury evidence package when the first one hit and I thought it was a cramp from sitting too long. The second one came twelve minutes later and I thought it was something I ate. The third came eight minutes after that and I stopped pretending. "Ezra." I said his name once. Not loud. He was in the next room reviewing Dominic's legal briefs. He must have heard something in my voice because he was in the kitchen within seconds, still holding a highlighter, his face shifting from focused to alert. "It's time," I said. He dropped the highlighter. It rolled across the floor and neither of us looked at it again. He was on the phone with Naomi before I finished my next breath, his voice tight and controlled but his hands fumbling with the car keys in a way that betrayed everything his voice was trying to hide. Naomi's hospital was twenty minutes away. A privat

POV: Lena Moretti The new house was on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood where nobody cared about the Crane name because nobody here moved in those circles. Three stories. Red brick. A front porch with room for two chairs. A kitchen with windows that let in actual sunlight, which I'd forgotten was a thing that kitchens could do after months in safe houses and cottages and the perpetual twilight of The Obsidian. Ezra found it. Or rather, Dominic found it and Ezra approved it and Naomi vetted the security profile and I made the final decision because that was how we operated now. My call. My approval. The house that would become ours needed to feel like mine first. It wasn't The Obsidian. No glass walls. No surveillance-grade security systems built into the architecture. No forty-floor remove from the world below. It was street-level. Human-scale. The kind of place where you could hear your neighbors and smell their cooking and wave at the mail carrier without a security briefing

POV: Lena Moretti After Sera fell asleep and Ezra went to his room and the brownstone settled into the heavy quiet of a house holding its breath before something big, I went to my desk. Opened the encrypted drive case. Pulled out my mother's final letter, the one dated two weeks before her death, and read it one more time. The handwriting was the same shaky script I'd memorized months ago in a cottage by the ocean. The words I'd read so many times they'd burned themselves into my brain. He knows I have the documents. He's having me followed. The proof is in the foundation of the house. Literally. Under the hearthstone in the Moretti living room. I'd sent Naomi to check three weeks ago. While I was still in the hospital after Sera's birth. While Ezra was arguing about security personnel and Dominic was filing preliminary legal motions. I'd asked Naomi to go to my father's house, wait until Marco was passed out, find the hearthstone in the living room, and retrieve whatever was under