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Home / Romance / My Ex-Husband's Enemy Loved Me better: A Hockey Rival Romanc / Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

All Chapters of My Ex-Husband's Enemy Loved Me better: A Hockey Rival Romanc: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

52 Chapters

CHAPTER 21

Elena's POV The name the journalist said was Georgina Vance. I sat down slowly on the couch because my legs made the decision before my brain did. "I need you to say that again," I said. "Georgina Vance," Sandra Okafor repeated. "She and Daniel St. James were in a relationship for approximately eight months during his junior and senior year of college. She was aware of the addiction from very early on. She was also aware of Damien's involvement in supplying the initial connection. And she chose not to disclose that to anyone, including Daniel's family, when Daniel died." I sat very still. "How do you know this?" "I have been investigating Damien Volkov for fourteen months," she said. "I have three independent sources who have corroborated the timeline. I also have emails." "Emails." "Between Georgina and Damien, from the period immediately following Daniel's death. Damien is careful about most things but he trusted Georgina completely at that point. The emails are ca

CHAPTER 22

Elena's POV Sandra Okafor was a small woman in her late thirties with sharp eyes and possess the kind of quiet confidence that came from spending a very long time in rooms where people did not want to tell her things and telling her them anyway. She stood up when Alexander and I walked in together. I watched her clock Alexander immediately, that slight widening of the eyes that people always had when they encountered him in person for the first time, and then she composed herself and shook both our hands and sat back down. "I did not expect you to bring him," she said to me not accusatory just noting it. "He has more right to what is in that envelope than anyone," I said. She considered that for a moment then she nodded and slid the envelope across the table. Alexander looked at it then looked at me. I gave him a small nod and he opened it. He read in silence. I watched his face. It did not move much, it never moved much, but I had learned to read the small things now. T

Chapter 23

Elena's pov I stared at the anonymous message on my phone screen the entire ride back to Alexander's apartment. I know what he is really after. All of it. The words kept rearranging themselves in my head no matter how many times I tried to put them down and think about something else. Because the truth was, even after everything Alexander had told me the night before, even after Daniel and the journal and it started as part of the plan but it is not entirely that anymore, I still had the uncomfortable awareness that I was only seeing the parts of this story that Alexander had chosen to show me. And someone out there knew the rest. "Who sent that message?" I asked. We were in the elevator going up to his floor. He was standing beside me looking at his phone. "I do not know yet," he said. "Marcus is tracing it." "Could it be Damien?" "Possibly. Could also be someone in Damien's circle." He paused. "or even Georgina." "What does she know?" I asked. "About your real reasons. What

CHAPTER 24

Elena's POV Alexander did not tell me about the lease over coffee this time. He took me to see it. "Get your coat," he said, at seven thirty in the morning, already pulling his own jacket on. "I want to show you something." "Show me what?" "You will see." We drove to Millbrook in the early light, the streets still mostly empty, delivery trucks idling outside shuttered storefronts, a man hosing down the sidewalk in front of a diner we passed twice while looking for parking. Alexander pulled up outside a narrow brick building with a faded awning and a For Lease sign taped crookedly in the window, two doors down from the corner where I used to wait for the bus during my months working for Miss Clara. "Is this it?" I asked. "This is it," he said. "I have not signed anything. I want to be very clear about that before we go in. I have a key because the landlord gave it to Rachel so we could look at it properly. That is all I have done." I looked at him for a moment, taking

CHAPTER 25

Alexander's POV I could not sleep that night, which was not unusual, except that this time I did not even pretend to try. Elena had gone back to her own apartment for the first time in several days, wanting, she said, to water the single plant she had been neglecting and sleep in her own bed for a change, and I had told her that was a good idea, healthy even, and then I had sat alone in my office until well past one in the morning doing the one thing I had promised myself, more than once, that I would eventually stop doing. I pulled out the file. It lived in the bottom drawer of my desk, a thick accordion folder gone soft at the corners from four years of being opened and closed in the middle of nights exactly like this one. Newspaper clippings. Printed emails. A timeline I had built and rebuilt so many times the paper itself had started to feel less like evidence and more like scripture, something I returned to not because it told me anything new but because the returning i

CHAPTER 26

Damien's POV The article had been sitting on my desk, printed out, for three days. I had read it so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds, the way a man worries at a wound to confirm it is still there. Elena Brooks. My name a footnote in her story now, the villain at the edge of someone else's redemption arc. I had built an entire life, an entire reputation, and a woman I had chosen with the same care I chose everything, had walked into a newspaper office and dismantled most of it in under an hour. I poured another drink and did not bother pretending, even to myself, that it was the first of the evening. The bakery was the part that genuinely surprised me. Not the interview, not the public sympathy curdling against me like milk left too long in the sun. The bakery. Elly's. A small, stupid sign in a small, stupid window in a neighborhood I had personally made sure she could never afford to stay in. She had built something anyway. It should not have mattered. In

CHAPTER 27

Elena's POV The first real day of cleaning Elly's came faster than I expected, the lease barely two days old, my hands already itching to start making the empty space into something that looked like mine. Miss Clara arrived at eight with two buckets, a stack of old rags she swore by over anything bought new, and an opinion about the dusty front window that she shared loudly before she had even fully stepped through the door. "This glass has not been touched in years," she announced. "Years, Elena. We start here." We spent the morning scrubbing, the radio Miss Clara had brought playing something warm and a little staticky from a station I did not recognize, the two of us working in the easy companionable rhythm we had built over the months I had worked under her at her own shop, except now the shop belonged to me and that small fact kept catching me by surprise every time I looked up and remembered it. "You are smiling at the floor," Miss Clara observed, around eleven, watc

CHAPTER 28

Alexander's POV Marcus called me at eleven that night, after Elena had gone home to her own apartment again. The easy good mood of the afternoon at the bakery still sitting warm in my chest when my phone lit up with his name. "I need you to look at something," he said, no greeting, which told me immediately this was not going to be a small thing. "Send it." A series of photographs landed in my messages a moment later. A gray SUV, parked at slightly different angles across three separate images, clearly taken at different times but unmistakably the same vehicle. One image showed it parked across from the bakery, the angle suggesting it had been taken from inside another car parked further down the block. Another showed it near Elena's old apartment building, the one she had stopped using regularly but still kept the lease on. A third, the most unsettling of the three, showed it parked outside the small grocery store two blocks from my own building, where Elena had taken to

CHAPTER 29

Elena's POV There were two more security cars outside the bakery the next morning than there had been the day before. Alexander, when I asked him about it over coffee, gave me an answer that was technically true and somehow still felt like it was missing something. "Marcus likes to rotate the patterns," he said, not quite meeting my eyes the way he usually did when he was being fully honest with me. "Keeps things unpredictable. It is routine." "It did not feel routine yesterday," I said. "There was one car parked outside all afternoon while we were eating lunch." "That probably was routine," he said. "I would not read too much into it." I looked at him for a moment longer than the conversation strictly required. The same small prickling instinct I had felt weeks earlier with the lease rising again, quieter this time, easier to push down because I genuinely did not have anything concrete to hang it on. A car parked outside. Extra security. Things that, on their own, meant a

CHAPTER 30

Damien's POV Pavel came to my office himself this time, no calls, no careful intermediaries, which told me before he even sat down that he had something he considered worth the risk of being seen walking through my building. "We have a full picture now," he said, sliding a thin folder across my desk. "Her schedule, the bakery's hours and the security patterns around both locations." I opened the folder slowly, savoring it the way I savored very little else these days. Photographs. Timestamps. A typed summary in clean, clinical language that turned my wife's entire life into something measurable, something I could finally hold and study instead of simply raging against from a distance. She opened the bakery at six most mornings, alone, the older woman, Miss Clara, typically arriving closer to seven. St. James usually came by sometime after his morning practice, anywhere between eleven and one, depending on the team's schedule. The security detail Marcus Reyes had assembled

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