Lahat ng Kabanata ng THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE : Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

OLIVIA’S POV My father had fallen asleep for the third time that afternoon before I finally accepted that he was done talking for the day.I sat beside him for a few more minutes anyway. Watching the steady rise and fall of his chest. Listening to the monitor. Letting the room be what it was.Then I kissed the back of his hand the way he used to kiss mine and gathered my bag and left.The drive home was quiet.The driver navigated the evening city without conversation and I sat in the back with my head resting against the window and watched the lights come on one by one as the sky darkened. The motorway. The familiar sequence of turns. The gates of the compound opening ahead of us.I got out of the car and stood for a moment in the evening air before going inside.The grounds were still and dark around me. The house glowed from its windows. Warm and large and entirely itself.I went in.Clara was in the kitchen.The smell of dinner reached me before I opened the door. Something with

JADEN’S POVShe came to my study that evening with her phone in her hand and her mind already made up.I knew the moment she knocked.There was a quality to it. Two clean precise knocks with no hesitation between them. The knock of someone who had decided on something and was arriving to act on it rather than still deciding in the hallway.“Come in.”She crossed the room and sat down without being asked. Set her phone face up on the desk between us and turned it so I could see the screen.A company filing. Old. Archived. The kind that lived in the back corners of regulatory databases that most people never knew to look for.I looked at the screen.I looked at her.Her expression was steady. Not angry. Not hurt. Something more complex than both of those. The particular expression of someone who had found a piece of a picture and was sitting across from the person who held the rest of it.“My father remembered Robert Parker this morning,” she said. “They were connected through a consort

OLIVIA’S POVI woke up with it still sitting there.Not lighter. Not resolved. Just present in the way that things were present the morning after you had learned something significant. Part of the air. Part of the first breath.I lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and gave myself exactly five minutes to feel it fully before I got up.Then I got up.The kitchen was empty when I came downstairs.Clara had not started breakfast yet. Or she had and stepped away momentarily. The coffee pot was already on which meant someone had been down before me.I poured a cup without waiting for it to fully finish brewing. The kind of impatience that had nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with needing something to do with my hands.I wrapped both palms around the mug.Stood at the counter.Heard footsteps.Jaden came into the kitchen from the direction of the study. Already dressed. The morning version of him that had been working for an hour before the house woke up.He saw me.I looked

OLIVIA’S POVAfter Shay had gone back home that day. I sat with myself and thought about what she said to me, then I went to Jaden’s study after dinner.Not immediately after dinner. I sat in my room for a while first. Long enough to be sure I knew what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Long enough to make sure I was coming from a settled place rather than the complicated unnamed one that had been sitting in my chest since the night before.When I felt ready I got up.Knocked on the study door.“Come in.”He was at his desk. The familiar scene. Files. The lamp casting its warm pool of light across everything. The city visible through the window behind him doing its nighttime thing.He looked up when I came in.I crossed the room and sat in the chair across from him.He waited.That was one of the things I had come to understand about Jaden Parker. He never rushed toward a conversation before it was ready. He simply held the space and waited for it to arrive.I looked at my h

OLIVIA’S POVWithin an hour the house was different.Not loudly. Not dramatically. But different in the specific way of a space when the person at the center of it has shifted into a different register entirely.Jaden moved through the ground floor with a focused precision that I had not seen in the house before. I had seen versions of it at galas and business dinners. The controlled professional manner. The careful placement of every word and gesture.This was not that.This was something stripped of all performance. Something entirely functional and entirely directed. Like watching a machine that had been built for a specific purpose finally doing the thing it was built for.He was on the phone within minutes of finishing breakfast.I heard his voice in the study. Low and deliberate. Not raised. Never raised. But carrying a quality that made the walls feel slightly different around it. Then another call. Then Ethan at the door forty minutes later. Then two other men I had not seen b