Semua Bab One Night with My Ex-Fiancé’s Ruthless Brother: Bab 91 - Bab 100

(Keyla POV) Hendricks asked Draxler directly, voice even and methodical. “The board’s concern,” he said, in the way he addressed everything, “is whether the engagement can be considered objective given the personal history between Ms. Tamara and the Churchill family. Your assessment?” Draxler looked at the documents in the center of the table, not at me, not at Eleanor. “The evidence stands,” he said, “whether Ms. Tamara stays or leaves.” He said it the way he said most things — without performance, without the kind of emphasis that would have made it sound like he was defending me. Just the fact, stated. “If the concern is objectivity, the question is whether the documents are accurate. Not who found them.” Eleanor looked at him with the expression she used when he’d done something she disapproved of but couldn’t contest on process. Her fingers tightened once around the edge of her folder. “An independent audit of the internal leak infrastructure,” Draxler continued, turning to

(Keyla POV) The mediator said *DNA testing* with the calm efficiency of someone discussing forms that needed signatures instead of a four-year-old boy. The words never reached me as procedure. Every time I heard them, I pictured someone reaching for Leo before he'd even been asked whether he understood why. Whoever designed mediation rooms believed furniture could make conflict feel reasonable of round table, matching chairs, and water sweating quietly in a glass pitcher that nobody had touched. Eleanor to my left, which I hadn't been able to prevent. Draxler across from me. Priscilla beside me with her notepad. We'd already spent twenty minutes agreeing on procedures everyone in the room already understood. Then she finally arrived at the real reason we were there. By the time she finished, the whole thing sounded almost harmless. That was the trick. She folded her hands on the table before continuing. "The estate clause requires...From a procedural standpoint, DNA testing remai

(Keyla POV)I waited until we were back at the hotel, until Leo had eaten something and Nora had taken him to wash his hands and the room had settled into the ordinary sounds of an evening, before I knelt down in front of him.He looked at me. He'd been carrying the psychologist visit in the particular way he carried things he was still sorting — quietly, with his toy car in his hand, turning it over the way he did when his brain was working on something that hadn't finished yet.I waited until he was looking at me again. "Your yes matters, Leo. I need you to know that. Whatever you decide, it matters."He looked at the car. He frowned a little. "But...There's more.""My job is to protect it." I kept my voice even, the voice for things that were true and uncomfortable simultaneously. "Your yes is real. It's also not the only thing. I'm your mother. I'm the one who decides whether something is safe. Both of those things are true at the same time."He turned the car over once more, the

(Keyla POV) "Can I hold your sleeve?" Leo asked. We were in the waiting room of the lab — a different location from the one I'd been expecting, moved at my request to a pediatric-specialist facility rather than a standard clinical lab, because the scale of the rooms was different and the chairs were different and the staff were used to children rather than just used to procedures. I smiled and held out my arm a little farther. "Of course." He took hold of my sleeve — not my hand, specifically my sleeve, the fabric at the forearm — and held it with the focused grip he used for things he'd decided he was going to do even though they were scary. The toy car was in his jacket pocket. He'd brought it the way he brought it to doctor's appointments, which I'd learned meant he was treating this like something that mattered but that he'd decided was survivable. Nora was beside me with her bag — snacks, a picture book, a small travel pack of wipes that she'd brought to every appointment si

(Keyla / Draxler / Marcus POV)*POV: Keyla*The lab email arrived at eleven-fourteen with the subject line *Collection Receipt — Case Reference 2024-CS-0047* and a single paragraph confirming both samples in custody, both sealed and intact, result window seventy-two hours from receipt.Seventy-two hours. Long enough for a child to forget about the swab. Long enough for every adult around him to remember it every hour.I read the email twice before letting the laptop fall shut against the duvet. My eyes drifted to the ceiling, though I wasn't really looking at it anymore. The weight of those three days settled low in my chest, a slow, steady pressure that refused to lift.Nora came back with two mugs of tea without asking whether I wanted one. She settled onto the other bed, tucked one leg beneath her, and for a while we simply sat there, sharing the kind of silence we'd learned over the years. The steam from the mugs rose between us, quiet and ordinary in a night that didn't feel ordi