Lahat ng Kabanata ng Claimed By The Wrong Voss : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 18

She had been watching him for twenty years.Not obviously. Never, obviously; that was the first thing she had understood about loving Caelum Voss. You did not do it loudly. You did not announce it or perform it or let it sit anywhere on your face where it could be examined. You carried it the way you carried anything that mattered too much to risk: quietly, internally, in the part of yourself that nobody else had access to.She knew every variation of his attention.This morning it was different.She could not name what was different. That was the part that had stayed with her through the entire family breakfast and into the afternoon and was still sitting in her chest now.─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──Serena Alcott had come to the Voss house at nine years old.Her mother had been a close friend of Aldric's, the kind of friendship that came with obligations, and one of those obligations had been a girl who needed stability after a difficult year. The patriarch had provided it without drama, the way h

She had not been able to sleep.That was the honest reason she was in the library at half past eleven, not because she needed a book, not because the library had anything she couldn't find upstairs. She had needed somewhere that wasn't her bedroom, somewhere the silence felt chosen rather than assigned to her, and the library was the one room in this house that had never felt hostile.She had been there forty minutes, curled into the corner of the large chair near the window, when the door opened.She knew who it was before she looked up.She looked up anyway.─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──Caelum stopped for exactly one second when he saw her. Then he came in.He did not apologize for interrupting. Did not offer to leave, did not ask if she minded. He crossed to the drinks cabinet with the unhurried certainty of a man who had decided something before he entered the room, poured two fingers of something dark, and sat in the chair across from her.Not close. The low table between them. But close enough

The woman was already waiting when Zaria pulled up.She was standing outside a small café forty minutes from the Voss estate, elderly, small, with the particular stillness of someone who had been deciding whether to run for the past twenty years and had finally chosen to stay. She had a canvas bag held against her chest with both hands; the way you hold something when letting go of it is the most frightening part of why you came.Zaria got out of the car."Mrs. Amanda?" She had gotten the name on the phone just before the call ended.The woman nodded. She looked at Zaria's face for a long moment with an expression that was doing several things at once: recognition, grief, and something close to relief that had clearly been waiting a very long time for somewhere to land."You look like her," she said. "Around the eyes."Zaria's chest did something she kept off her face. "Can we sit?"─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──They took a corner table. The café was nearly empty. The woman ordered nothing. She kept t

The clink of silver against porcelain should have been harmless. Instead, it rang like a warning.Zaria sat at the long breakfast table with her hands folded in her lap, spine straight, expression neutral. Across from her, the mother-in-law—Ethan’s mother—lifted her teacup and let her gaze settle on Zaria with the precision of someone choosing exactly where to cut.“Still no good news on the family front, I suppose?” The words landed softly, almost kindly, but the room heard the blade underneath. “Time does have a way of running out for these things. Especially when one party seems… reluctant.”Heat crawled up Zaria’s neck. She felt the eyes: Vivienne’s polite curiosity, Camille’s quiet satisfaction, and even Ethan’s sudden discomfort. Six weeks. The number pulsed behind her ribs like a second heartbeat. She opened her mouth to answer, something measured, something safe—“Some matters are better left to those directly involved.” Caelum’s voice cut in, low and even, from the head of th