Semua Bab My Ex-Husband's Enemy Loved Me better: A Hockey Rival Romanc: Bab 21 - Bab 30

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

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

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

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

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