Semua Bab Fake Heiress, Real Desire: Bab 41 - Bab 50

Julia — First-Person POVI knew something was wrong before the elevator finished opening.The sound of it reached me first — or rather, the absence of sound. The executive floor had a particular ambient noise that I had learned in the weeks of working inside it: keyboards, low conversations, the soft percussion of a busy office moving through its rhythms. I knew what it sounded like when it was operating normally.This wasn't that.The silence that greeted the opening elevator doors was the silence of a room that had been talking and had stopped — suddenly, completely, with the specific quality of people who had been caught doing something they understood they shouldn't be doing.The doors finished opening.And every face on the floor turned toward me.Not curiously. Not casually.With the focused, hungry attention of people who had just received information and were now looking at the subject of it in real life for the first time.My stomach dropped.I stepped off the elevator because

Julia — First-Person POVBy morning I had stopped pretending I was going to sleep.I sat in the chair by the window with my knees drawn up and the city doing what cities did at four in the morning — keeping its lights on, moving its nighttime people through its nighttime streets, entirely indifferent to what was happening in an apartment on its upper floors.Ava didn't want to hurt me quickly.The thought had arrived somewhere around two in the morning and had refused to leave. It had the specific quality of a true thing — the kind that settled into you and stayed rather than the kind that arrived with force and faded. I turned it over, examined it, pressed on it.She wanted to unravel me.Piece by piece. Systematically. The white rose placed with deliberate elegance. The security code she had researched. The pregnancy brochure taken to let me know she had been in the space where I was most private. The flowers that connected to my mother's funeral — that connected to the night I disap

Julia, Alan & Kai — Alternating POV JuliaThe apartment felt wrong before the door finished closing behind me.Not dangerous in the obvious sense — nothing displaced, nothing broken, no visible evidence of entry. But the quality of the silence was wrong in the specific way I had learned to recognize over the last several weeks. The silence of a space that had been occupied and had not yet finished settling back into itself.Staged.I stopped near the door.My hand was still on the handle.Leave, said the part of me that had been learning to listen to itself.You came this far, said the part that was tired of running.I moved deeper inside.Checked the locks. The windows. The hallway.My phone wasn't on the counter where I had left it.I knew with the cold certainty of a body that had been through enough to trust its own signals — Ava — before I finished the thought.The shadow behind the sofa moved.Not much.But enough.I turned.She stepped out of the darkness the way she always mo