All Chapters of Ruined By Mr. Cross: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Selene’s PovThe forty-eight hours passed in a strange, suspended rhythm, ordinary rituals performed under extraordinary watch — breakfast with Lucy while security rotated unseen beyond the tree line, bath time with someone new quietly stationed outside her window, every normal motion of family life now laced through with a vigilance none of us spoke about in front of her.By the second evening, Marcus had the plan fully built: a gala announcement, leaked deliberately through channels Talia would still have access to if she’d kept even peripheral contacts inside the old network, timing our supposed vulnerability to a night when the house would appear thinly guarded. Every inch of it, in reality, would be watched.“You don’t have to be there,” Damien said, finding me in the nursery doorway that last evening, watching Lucy sleep with a fierceness I hadn’t been able to shake since Talia’s name appeared on that screen. “Marcus can run it. You could stay upstairs, with her.”“No,” I said,

Selene’s PovLucy was asleep when we got home, curled small under her blankets, a security officer stationed silently outside her door, and I stood in the doorway for a long moment just watching her breathe, the way I had four nights ago after the cabin, the way I suspected I’d keep needing to for a long time after tonight.“She’s safe,” Damien said quietly, coming up behind me, his hands settling on my shoulders. “Marcus has eyes on every entrance. Nothing gets near her tonight.”“I know,” I said. “I just need to look a little longer.”He let me, without a word, standing solid behind me while I memorized the rise and fall of our daughter’s small chest, and only when I finally exhaled and let the door click softly shut did he turn me gently to face him.“Come downstairs,” he said. “You need to eat something. You’ve been running on adrenaline since the ballroom.”I let him lead me, too tired to argue, and found Marcus already in the kitchen, a laptop open on the counter, exhaustion car

Selene’s PovDamien kept one hand at my back, guiding rather than restraining, the two of us moving together through a hallway lined with photographs I didn’t recognize — Helena, decades younger, standing beside a man whose face I’d never seen before.“That’s him,” Marcus murmured, pausing beside one frame. “Gabriel Voss. Confirmed.”The man in the photograph had an unremarkable face, exactly the kind built for being forgotten, and something about that ordinariness chilled me more than any obvious menace could have.A door at the end of the hall stood ajar, light spilling from within, and Marcus signaled the security team to hold as he eased it open.The room was empty. A desk, papers scattered, a laptop still open and humming, but no one in the chair behind it.“He knows we’re here,” Damien said quietly, scanning the space. “Or he left before we arrived.”“The access log was two hours old,” Marcus said, moving to the laptop, scanning the screen with quick, practiced eyes. “He could s

Selene’s PovLucy was in the kitchen with Naomi when we got home, sitting at the counter with a mixing bowl nearly as big as she was, flour dusted across her cheek in a mirror of the morning we’d had at the lake days ago, and the sight of her, safe and laughing and utterly unaware of the parking lot we’d just come from, undid something in me that had been holding rigid since the study, since the first message, since coming home landed on a phone screen a lifetime ago this same week.“Mom!” She looked up, delighted, entirely unbothered. “We’re making cookies. Naomi says I put in too much sugar but I think that’s the whole point of cookies.”“She’s not wrong,” I managed, crossing the kitchen, and Damien’s hand found the small of my back as I pulled Lucy into a hug she only half-tolerated, too busy being eight and covered in flour to understand why her mother was suddenly holding on a little too long.“You’re squishing me,” she said, muffled against my shoulder, and I laughed, actually l

Selene’s PovThe wedding planning began the way everything in our life seemed to lately — chaotic, joyful, and thoroughly hijacked by an eight-year-old with very strong opinions about flowers.“Not roses,” Lucy declared, spread out on the living room floor with a stack of Naomi’s old bridal magazines, flour-stained fingerprints somehow still visible on the corners of the pages despite the cookies being weeks behind us now. “Roses are what everyone does. You should do something nobody else does.”“Like what,” Damien asked, settling onto the floor beside her with the particular ease he’d found again over the last month, the tension that had lived permanently in his shoulders since the porch finally, gradually loosening.“Wildflowers,” Lucy said, with the absolute conviction of a child who had clearly given this considerable thought. “Like the ones by the lake. Because that’s where you guys go when you want to remember you love each other.”I felt something catch in my throat at that, th