All Chapters of Married To My Ex-Husband's Uncle: Chapter 11 - Chapter 19

Dante.“Run it again.”Elias stayed silent for half a second too long before answering.“We already did.”I looked up from the documents spread across my desk.“Then you'll probably find the same thing twice.”The study went quiet after that.Elias gave a single nod and stepped back out of the room without another word. The door clicked shut behind him softly.I leaned back slightly in the chair and looked toward the windows.Rain crawled down the glass in slow uneven streaks while the city sat under a layer of gray fog and steel-colored clouds. Chicago looked colder this early in the morning. The house had been quieter than usual since we returned from the ballroom.Staff moved differently after nights like yesterday. Soft-footed enough that most people wouldn't notice it.But that had never been the case for me..I looked back down at the photographs spread across the desk.Victor had gone pale the second he saw me. Board members opening document packets with shaking hands. Investo

Xena.I woke up before the house did.For a few seconds I stayed still beneath the sheets staring at the ceiling while pale morning light pushed slowly through the curtains.The room was quiet in that specific way expensive houses always were before sunrise. Dead men tell no tales.The sentence had followed me to sleep.It sat in the room with me now too.I rolled onto my side slowly and looked toward the window.Rain had stopped sometime during the night. The city beyond the glass looked washed clean and gray.I should've been angry.At the manipulation. At the danger. At the fact that Dante Yale walked into an interrogation room already knowing exactly what kind of war he was inviting me into.But anger required surprise.And somewhere beneath everything else, I understood something uncomfortable about myself.If he'd told me the full truth that night—I still would've signed.I closed my eyes briefly.That realization settled strangely inside me.I pushed the blankets back and got

Dante.By three in the morning, I had exactly six photographs spread across my desk and a growing desire to break someone's hands.Luckily it wasn't Axel's. Which was interesting. Because objectively speaking, Axel Darwin was the easier target here.Emotional, predictable and close enough to Xena to become useful to the wrong people without even realizing he was being used.But the longer I looked at the situation, the less this felt like Axel and the more it felt like infrastructure.The planning and timing were properly arranged. The photographs themselves were professionally done. It had enough intimacy implied to create a story without showing anything explicitly damaging.Xena stepped out of the café first while Axel touched the small of her back crossing the street. The two of them standing close enough outside the entrance to suggest familiarity.Whoever arranged it understood exactly how society scandals worked.The implication always performed better than the truth.I picked

Dante.By the time the jet took off, I had already reviewed the Zurich meeting file three times and learned absolutely nothing useful from any of those attempts because my attention kept drifting approximately six feet to the left.Which was inefficient.Xena sat across from me in one of the leather seats near the window, reading through financial reports with the kind of concentration that suggested the world around her had temporarily stopped existing.The problem was that I kept noticing things that had absolutely no strategic value whatsoever.The way she tucked loose strands of hair behind her ear when reading something irritating.The fact that she mouthed numbers silently while reviewing profit structures.The very faint crease between her brows that appeared whenever somebody used unnecessarily complicated corporate language to disguise stupidity.None of this mattered operationally.Which made the fact that I kept noticing it increasingly irritating.“You've been staring at t

Dante.By the morning of the birthday gathering, the evidence package had grown thick enough to qualify as a small weapon.Which felt appropriate.I stood in the study flipping through the final copies while Victor reviewed security placement near the door.“Hannah's confirmed attendance,” he said. “Adrian arrived thirty minutes ago.”“Gerald?”“Already there.”Of course he was.Men like my brother never missed opportunities to protect collapsing structures they still mistakenly believed they controlled.I closed the file carefully.“Media?”“Contained outside the property for now.”“For now?”Victor hesitated slightly.“Leaks are already moving through finance circles after Zurich.”Interesting.Very interesting.The room fell quiet briefly while I reviewed the final timeline again.Hannah's insertion into the household. The gala setup. The deepfake coordination. The attempted photograph release. Financial movement connected to Reeves.A knock sounded lightly against the study door b