บททั้งหมดของ HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: บทที่ 131 - บทที่ 140

Amelia's POVI let his last sentence sit in the room for a long moment before I said anything, turning it over, looking for the crack in it the way I had learned to look for cracks in everything lately, in every document, every phone call, every kindness that arrived a little too conveniently timed to be entirely innocent."How did you get all of this so fast," I said. "Whitlow's history. The second client. The account structure. Three sleepless nights, you said. Three nights, Damien, and you have more on this than Nathan's team has managed in over a week, with a full firm behind him and every legal database money can buy."Something flickered across his face, quick, almost offended. "I have resources most people don't.""That's not an answer.""I've known Whitlow's name for years. I didn't have to start from nothing.""Why would you already know his name," I said, when he did not immediately elaborate."Because men like Adrian Blackwood and lawyers like Grant Whitlow exist in a very

~Ethan's POV~Amelia sent me the account number without explanation, just the digits and a single line: someone inside your company, three weeks before Serena showed up. I stared at it for a long moment before I opened my own systems, my coffee going cold beside the keyboard, because some part of me already knew, with the specific dread of a man who has spent years trusting the wrong kind of silence, that I was not going to like what I found.It took less than ten minutes to trace it. The account belonged to Richard Colson, my chief operating officer, a man who had been with me for eleven years, who had stood beside me at my wedding, who had held Noah as an infant the one time Amelia let anyone outside the family hold him in the first week, back when she still measured trust in minutes and gave almost none of it away.I read the name three times, waiting for the letters to rearrange themselves into someone else, anyone else.It did not.I called him immediately. The line rang four tim

I read Olivia's message again, standing in the same spot in my office where I had been standing when it first landed, Ethan still beside me, the two of us caught in the particular stillness of people who have just been told something and have not yet decided how to move again.Whether Amelia Carter even knew for certain herself.I put the phone down on my desk and stood there a moment, both hands flat against the cool wood, waiting for the old feeling to arrive, because I knew it was coming before it did, the way you know a storm is coming from the particular color the sky turns first. Seventeen years ago, a room full of people had watched Beatrice Sinclair ask, in a voice pitched just loud enough to carry to every corner of that dining hall, whether a woman like me could even be trusted to know who fathered her own child. I had stood there and taken it, because I had nowhere else to stand, no company, no name of my own, nothing but a marriage that had already stopped protecting me an

I stood without answering him at first, letting the silence do whatever work it needed to do, because there was no answer worth giving a man who had just spent an entire dinner proving he still knew exactly where to aim, and I refused to hand him the satisfaction of watching it land in real time."Thank you for the meal," I said instead, my voice perfectly level, the voice I used on boards that had already decided to vote against me and simply needed the formality of a final word before they did. "I hope it was worth it.""Amelia.""Goodnight, Adrian."I did not look back at him on my way to the door, and the car was waiting exactly where it had left me, engine running, headlights already cutting through the dark driveway, as if the whole evening had been timed down to the minute, which, knowing him, it probably had been.I was furious the entire drive home, quietly, the specific fury that does not shout because it has learned shouting only ever gives other people something to use aga

I did not move for a long time, and afterwards I could not have told anyone how long that time was, because the phone screen kept dimming and I kept touching it awake, and every time the image resurfaced my brain did the same useless loop of recognition and refusal, the way it had done seven years ago when I had first walked into the emptied bedroom and understood, without wanting to understand, that she was actually gone.She was asleep.She was asleep in her own bed, in the house I had spent two weeks pretending I did not know the address of, and somebody had been close enough to her face to count her eyelashes.I called Nathan.He picked up on the second ring this time. He must have heard something in the silence before I spoke, because before I had gotten a syllable out, he said, "What.""Somebody was inside her house tonight.""What.""Nathan. I need you to come here. Now. And I need you to bring whoever your best person is on image forensics, and I need you to have already calle