Alle Kapitel von Married to My Enemy's Son: Kapitel 31 – Kapitel 40

Saturday arrived without incident. Nadia should have known something was wrong the moment she walked through the front door. Nadia became aware of it on a Saturday afternoon when she came back from her weekly call with her parents to find the estate dining room set for a formal dinner that had not been on any schedule she had seen. The table was laid for four, the good china was out, and there were candles, which the dining room did not usually have on a Saturday. She stopped in the doorway, taking in the table before stepping inside. Mrs. Park emerged from the kitchen with the expression she wore when she was carrying out instructions she considered professionally correct but personally questionable. "Mr. Cullen asked for the room to be prepared for dinner at seven," Mrs. Park said. "He mentioned it was a special occasion." "What occasion?" Nadia said. "He did not specify," Mrs. Park said, which told Nadia Mrs. Park knew perfectly well what this was about and had no intention of

The literature project had been building toward this day for four weeks.Nadia had assigned it at the start of March with the specific purpose of forcing her Year Twelve students to do something harder than comprehension: to build an argument of their own, unprompted by an exam question, about a text they had chosen themselves. She had kept the rules deliberately loose. One text, one central claim, one presentation of no more than ten minutes. The only requirement was that the argument be theirs and that they could defend it when challenged.She had challenged all of them in the preparation sessions. Tobias had initially chosen an argument so broad it could have applied to any text written in the last century, and she had sent him back twice before he narrowed it to something that had teeth. Priya had the opposite problem: her argument was so precise that it excluded evidence she needed, and Nadia had spent two sessions helping her widen the frame without losing the point. A student n

Leo had worked for Caiden Wolfe for eight years, two months, and eleven days. He had never deliberately counted the days. It was simply the kind of detail that stayed with a man who noticed everything. Eight years. The start date had been a Monday in January—he remembered it specifically because the city had been frozen solid and he had arrived twelve minutes early. By the time Leo walked in, Caiden was already working. That had told him almost everything he needed to know. In eight years Leo had seen a great deal. He had managed seventeen international trips, forty-two board meetings that ran past midnight, six corporate acquisitions of varying complexity, and one that fell through at the last stage which had left Caiden unnaturally still, a silence Leo had learned to recognize as more dangerous than anger. He had managed three addresses, two cars, one estate, and a household staff of nine. He had arranged dinners and declined invitations and coordinated schedules with a precision

The background check on Nadia Verne had been initiated six months ago, in the standard manner Leo applied to anyone who came into sustained contact with the Wolfe household.It was routine. Nothing personal. It was the same process he had applied to the new kitchen staff member in January, to the contractor who had come to repair the east wing plumbing in October, and to the journalist whose number he had traced in March. Leo treated background checks the way other people treated routine maintenance: regularly, thoroughly, and without particular emotional investment in the outcome. The process existed because it had been designed by people who understood that the absence of information was a liability, and Leo had never found a reason to disagree with that principle.The initial check on Nadia had returned clean. Teaching credentials verified, employment history consistent, no financial irregularities beyond the manageable debt situation he had already logged and that had since been r

The question had been sitting in the back of her mind since the night she stood in front of the library shelf and read the caption on the photograph for the second time.Harlan Wolfe. Wolfe Meridian Corp, 1994.She had known the name long before she moved into this house. Growing up, she'd heard it the way you hear old family stories through half-closed doors,often enough to remember it, never clearly enough to understand it. She knew it the way she'd known so many things about her father—through fragments, unfinished conversations, and the spaces adults thought children didn't notice.What she wanted now wasn't another fact. She wanted to hear him say the name aloud. The photograph had told her what it was. Maybe he could tell her what it had been.She waited until Tuesday evening. Somehow, the question felt like it belonged to an ordinary night. Caiden was in the sitting room on the second floor, the one he used when the study felt too formal and Cullen was using the library. He was