All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 161 - Chapter 167

Amelia's POVDamien brought the folder to my house at four in the afternoon.He did not knock. Ethan opened the door before he could, because we had all been waiting for him since he had called from the vault two hours earlier, and none of us had pretended otherwise. He walked in with the folder in one hand and my name in capital letters on the red tab facing outward, and he set it on my kitchen table without a word, because there was nothing he could have said in that moment that would have made the file smaller than it was.I sat down.I opened it.The first thing I read was a two page summary written in Richard Blackwood's angular hand, dated seventeen years ago, describing me. Not in the way a rival describes a rival. In the way a naturalist describes a species he has just discovered. My habits. My speech patterns. The way I held a coffee cup. The three restaurants I had been observed eating at during the second trimester of my pregnancy. The two coats I had been wearing that autu

~Damien's POV~Serena said the name in the second half of the sentence.Marcus Vale.I did not react in the room. I made my face do the small unmoved thing I had learned to do at boardroom tables when a colleague had just handed me a piece of information I did not want anyone else present to see me register. But I saw Amelia's eyes come up to me across the coffee table, and I saw Nathan's phone stop moving in his hand, and I understood, in the space of one heartbeat, that the piece of the picture we had been missing for nine years had just clicked into place.Marcus Vale had not been Richard's employee.Marcus Vale had been Richard's partner.I stood up."Nathan. My car. Now. I am going to Murray Hill.""Damien...""No. He recruited her. He fed her the fake DNA report. He put her into my ex-wife's marriage for nine years. He walked out of the boardroom I fired him from and spent the next decade turning a woman he had never met into a weapon against me, and he sat across from me last w

Amelia's POVEthan came into the bedroom with the laptop in his hands and I was awake before he had crossed the room, because I had not been sleeping either."Motion at the north tree line. One figure. Walking. Slow."I was out of the bed and into a coat before he had finished the sentence.We watched from the front room monitor. Two security men were already moving down the drive on foot, radios low, hands where hands go when a man is prepared to draw a weapon he hopes he will not need to. The figure at the tree line stopped fifteen yards inside the property. It did not run. It did not raise its hands. It simply stood there.Then it lifted something small into the air.A phone. Screen out. Toward the security team.The lead guard's radio crackled."Mrs. Vale. The individual is holding up an ID. Female. Mid thirties. She says her name is Claire Bennett. She is asking for Mr. Sinclair by name."I looked at Ethan."Bring her in.""Amelia...""Search her. Search whatever she is carrying.

I did not answer him right away.I could not, because a seventeen year old boy in socks had just walked down a staircase and said, into a room where a stranger had just told me a child was not my daughter, the one sentence I had been unable to say to myself in seven years.Claire quietly stood up. She said something about checking on Mia. She went upstairs. She was gone inside twelve seconds, and neither of us watched her leave, because neither of us was in the same room as her anymore.Noah came the rest of the way in. He sat down on the arm of the couch across from me."Dad.""Noah.""I meant it.""I know you did. That is the part I am sitting with."He looked at the folded paper on the coffee table between us. The one with Mia's real father's name on it, that I had still not opened."You do not have to explain to me what you were feeling in there," he said. "I heard it. All of it. I was on the stairs from the beginning, and I want you to know I heard it. The chair at your kitchen t