Todos os capítulos de HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Capítulo 181 - Capítulo 190

The drive took forty two minutes.I did not read a headline. I did not answer a message. I did not call Ethan back to ask what he had meant, because the whole point of Ethan sending a sentence like that was that he intended to say the rest of it in the room with me, and I did not want to hear it broken up over a phone call.I let my hand rest against the small firm curve of my stomach for the entire drive.I did not speak to the baby. I never had. I had understood, from the first pregnancy, that the specific quiet promise a mother makes to a child in the first six months of a pregnancy is not made in words. It is made in the exact stillness of the palm.The car pulled up at ten past five.Every window on the ground floor of the house was warm.Ethan opened the door before I had reached the top step, and he was in a t-shirt and jeans and no shoes, and his hair was still wet at the ends from a shower he had taken in the last twenty minutes, and he looked at me on my own porch with the s

"Say it, Serena.""Amelia. The night I met Ethan. In 2018. At the fundraiser at the Frick. You remember.""I remember. I was in Milan that week. Ethan went alone. He came home and told me he had been introduced to a woman who worked at a gallery in Chelsea.""That was me. That was the introduction. What I never told you, what I never told him, what I never told a single person until this moment, is that the introduction was not accidental. It was assigned. I was told, three weeks before that fundraiser, by the woman who ran my handlers, that I was to attend the event, that I was to be introduced to Ethan specifically, and that I was to establish a first impression with him that would still be usable seven years later if the operation ever required me to insert myself into his life. She did not tell me why. She told me his name. She told me his firm. She told me his face. She told me that I was not to sleep with him, not to flirt with him, not to make myself memorable. I was to be plea

"Then who did, Vivienne."She looked at me for a long moment.She had aged in ways I had not been prepared for. She had spent eleven years pretending to be a woman she was not, and the pretending had cost her something the mirror in her own bathroom had probably not shown her, because she had stopped looking at it years ago.She folded her hands on the table."It did not begin with Richard. Richard joined the plan in 2016. Two years after I left Lumière. I had already been talking to somebody for eighteen months before he ever came into the room, and by the time he did, the initial framework had been drafted, the initial capital had been committed, and my role had been designed. Richard was recruited. He was not the founder.""By whom.""By a woman who had spent every year of the previous decade privately convinced that your success was not possible without manipulation. She believed, sincerely, that a person like you could not have risen at the rate you had risen unless there had bee

Damien's POVNathan came into the office at two twenty three.I had called him from the elevator on the way up. He arrived with a laptop under his arm and the specific unhurried purpose he wore when a case was about to close, and he set the laptop next to my hard drive on Amelia's desk and cracked his knuckles once, the way he did before he opened anything he had been waiting to open for a long time."Damien. Where did this come from.""Portugal. Nathan's team pulled it out of Vivienne Ashford's office when they arrested her. Encrypted. Two layers. Our forensics people cracked it at midnight and sent me the key at one thirty. I have not opened it. I wanted the two of you in the room with me when I did."Amelia sat down at her desk.Ethan was not there. She had told me in the elevator that she wanted this one at her own desk, with her chief of staff and her ex-husband, in a room that had belonged to her since she built it.I entered the key.The drive unlocked.The file structure sprea

"Sophia. Tell me the rest."She reached into her handbag.She did not pull out her phone. She pulled out a small silver compact I had seen her carry for years, that I had always assumed was ordinary, and she opened it on her knee and slid a memory card out of a hidden slot behind the mirror."Nathan. Take this now. I have not opened the images since I got on the plane. I did not want to look at the woman's face a second time before I was in a room with Amelia."Nathan took the card.He slotted it into a small reader on his laptop. The images loaded.There were nineteen of them.Sophia had photographed the woman leaving the bar of the Principe di Savoia three nights ago, from the far end of the lobby, using the compact camera she had been carrying since 2019 for exactly this reason. The images were high resolution. They captured the woman's face from three different angles as she crossed the lobby. She was in a black coat. Her hair was up. She was mid fifties, as Sophia had said. She w