Semua Bab One Night with My Ex-Fiancé’s Ruthless Brother: Bab 61 - Bab 70

(Keyla POV) Leo's excited voice cut through my thoughts. "Mom, is this treasure?" Leo held up the cufflink, tissue paper dangled from his other hand. Anything tiny and mysterious immediately became important to him that were small and interesting and obviously adult — with the combined energy of as far as Leo knew, he'd found a shiny object. I was halfway across the room. My head snapped up. I'd been packing the side pocket of my bag — passport, Leo's documents, the folder Priscilla had given me — and The search had already scattered things across the bed looking for his crayons. Leo trusted his own theories more than my answers were in my bag rather than his own, which they weren't, but convincing him otherwise would've taken longer than simply letting him look. His little hands always found the one thing I didn't want him touching. He'd found the velvet pouch in the outside pocket. I'd stopped keeping it in the inside zip months ago, complacency of a life abroad where no one kne

(Draxler POV) Nobody spoke while the archive loaded, old hotel systems were never in a hurry— the interface designed for a generation of IT infrastructure that treated speed as optional, the footage files large and uncompressed, the whole thing running on hardware that predated the renovation. Marcus had sourced the archive through a contact at the hotel's corporate parent rather than through Eleanor's formal request, which meant we had access to the same material Eleanor was waiting on, several hours ahead of her. The advantage was narrow and would close. Marcus clicked through the archive without rushing. Five years condensed into one timestamp. We were in the east study, door closed, Marcus's personal laptop rather than anything networked. The screen showed a grid of camera feeds — stills first, the way these archives presented — and Marcus moved through them methodically, the floor plan of the Aurelia Grand reconstructing itself in my memory as he went. Main entrance. Lobby.

(Keyla POV) Eleanor placed the document on the breakfast table beside the toast rack, in the specific position of something that was going to be discussed whether anyone wanted to discuss it or not. I'd come down early — Leo had woken at six and wanted cereal, and there was something about mornings in this house that made staying in the room feel worse than being in a room with Eleanor, which was a measure of how much I disliked that guest corridor. Leo was at the far end of the table with his bowl, more interested in whether the cereal floated than in anything the adults were doing. I looked at the document. It had a legal header. The name of a firm I didn't recognize, though the address was local, which meant it had been retained here rather than abroad. The language in the first paragraph was the formal kind — estate proceedings, minor named in protected clause, verification of familial connection required before provisions activated — and the second paragraph was brief and ver

(Keyla POV) "Is DNA a sickness?" Leo asked it from the back seat, between one juice box straw attempt and the next, looking out the window at the road the way he looked at most things — steadily, like he was waiting for the world to give him an honest answer. I checked the rearview mirror first. "No, where did you hear that word?" Leo pushed the straw the rest of the way into the box, "At breakfast. And before, in the hall." He took a quick sip before continuing. "And then at the car. You and Nora said it too." Nothing escaped Leo for long. Of course he had. I'd thought I was being careful, Apparently that wasn't enough, *quiet and absorbing everything.* She stayed facing the windshield. Nora, in the passenger seat, did not look at me. She was looking at the road with the studied neutrality of someone who had decided this one was mine to handle. I searched for words a four-year-old would understand. "It's not a sickness, DNA is like a code, everybody has one, that lives inside

(Draxler POV) I gave Blackthorn's staff thirty minutes. Marcus had identified the camera angle from the article's photo — a corridor on the second floor, east wing, near the guest rooms — and we'd pulled the household phone logs before Eleanor's morning briefing was finished. By ten-thirty, every staff member with access to that corridor during the funeral had been asked to surrender their devices to Marcus for temporary review. Most of them handed over their phones without asking a single question. One didn't. He was young — twenty-three, maybe, a junior housekeeping assistant who'd been brought on for the funeral week as additional staff. He stood in the service corridor with his phone in his hand and the expression of someone trying to calculate whether lying was still an option. Marcus held out his hand. "The photo of the funeral guests," Marcus waited. "The one that appeared in this morning's article." He was very calm about it, the calm of someone who already knew the answe