All Chapters of THE DRAVEN WIFE: Chapter 11 - Chapter 13

Chapter elevenSerena's POVI was setting a table for a circus family, and honestly, I deserved a medal for it. There was a pig, a junior pig, an upcoming stripper, a drug addict pretending to be a nun, an anti-prodigal son with anger issues the size of a continent, and then there was the mysterious queen mother herself; Octavia Draven. If patience was truly a virtue, then by now I should have qualified for sainthood. Unfortunately, I preferred champagne to halos, and revenge to forgiveness.Lord knows how I managed to finish the dish after the melodrama that took place in the kitchen earlier. Between Lucien standing entirely too close, my heart forgetting its job description, and that blonde menace appearing in his shirt looking like she had spent the night exactly where I feared she had, the entire morning felt like a badly written soap opera. The worst part wasn't even seeing her. The worst part was the fact that I cared enough to be annoyed.Which was ridiculous.Why do you care,

Chapter thirteen Serena’s POVThe morning no longer felt like morning in the Draven house, it felt like a carefully staged battlefield where every smile was sharpened into a weapon and every silence was just another threat waiting to be spoken aloud, and I sat there watching Octavia’s command ripple through the room like she owned not just the house but the air we were breathing when she finally spoke my name again.“Serena,” Octavia said calmly, setting her napkin down as though she was about to assign executions instead of breakfast instructions, “you were meant to go with Paulo today, yes?”“Yes,” I answered, already feeling the plan I had carefully built in my head start to crack at the edges, because today was supposed to be leverage, strategy, movement, not… this circus.“Grace will take your place,” she continued without looking at me, as though my schedule was something that could be casually erased, and I felt my jaw tighten because nothing about that woman ever felt like a