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Alle Kapitel von Claimed by his obsession : Kapitel 61 – Kapitel 70

71 Kapitel

CHAPTER 61

Sophia's POVIt was Remy.Remy who ordered the most food and arranged it on real plates. Remy who talked at Lena until she laughed. Remy who said same time next week to Richard before anyone else did. Remy who looked at the ceiling when things were hard and came back down when they were over.Remy whose eyes were on the table and whose hands were very still."Remy," Dominic said.Remy looked up.His face was not the face of someone caught doing something terrible. It was the face of someone who had been waiting for a specific conversation and had hoped it would never arrive and had known it always would."How much," Dominic said."Fifty thousand," Remy said."From the new account," Dominic said."Yes," Remy said."Who sent it," Dominic said.Remy looked at the table again."Diana," he said.The room was completely still."She contacted you," Damien said. Quiet and careful."Six weeks ago," Remy said. "Before she came back. Before any of the meetings or the hospital or any of it." He p

CHAPTER 62

Damien's POVSaturday morning arrived differently.Not quiet exactly. Just slower. Like the city outside had agreed to give us an extra hour before it became itself again.I lay in bed and listened to it and thought about the night before.Diana turning herself in. Remy's face when Carter put the document on the table. Lena walking out of the room with her phone and coming back with the specific expression of someone who had done something that cost them everything and the right thing at the same time.Sophia was still asleep beside me.I looked at her.She had been very quiet on the drive back from the main room last night. Not the processing quiet. Something deeper than that. The kind of quiet that meant things were settling into their permanent places rather than being actively worked through.I had let her have it.We had come to bed and she had lain against my chest and I had held her and after a while her breathing had slowed and she had slept and I had stayed awake a little lon

CHAPTER 63

Sophia's POVSunday came with rain.Not the violent kind. The soft persistent kind that made the city look like it was thinking about something. I stood at the kitchen window at seven in the morning and watched it come down on the streets below and thought about a bus stop and a metal bench and a night that had felt like an ending.Rain looked different from up here.From a bus stop it was something that happened to you. From forty floors up it was just weather.I thought about that for a while.Damien came in at six forty five with the reliability that had become the most dependable fact of my mornings and made coffee and came to stand beside me at the window.He looked at the rain."Portugal will be warmer," he said."It's March," I said. "Portugal in March is not warm.""Warmer than this," he said."That's a low bar," I said.He almost smiled.We stood at the window with our coffees and the rain came down and neither of us said anything for a while and the quiet was the good kind,

CHAPTER 64

Sophia's POVThe number was forty seven million dollars.I sat with that for a long time.Not because it didn't feel real. Because it felt too real in a way that required careful handling. Like something fragile that had been carried a long distance and had finally arrived and you didn't want to drop it at the last step.Forty seven million.Thirty years of unjust enrichment calculated and documented and submitted to a civil court.My parents had built a framework for cardiac mapping in a small flat in East London before I was born. They had registered a patent and believed in what they had made and then watched someone take it without asking and build a fortune on top of it.And now a number existed that said what that had been worth.Damien was very quiet beside me.The room was doing its Sunday thing around us. Remy with his bread. Richard at the far end. Lena in the chair. Dominic with his book. None of them knowing yet."Say something," Damien said quietly."I don't have the word

CHAPTER 65

Sophia's POVMonday I told Lena.Not in a meeting or a formal conversation. Just the two of us in the kitchen at nine in the morning with coffee and the rain still coming down outside and the particular privacy of a house that was mostly quiet on Monday mornings when everyone had gone back to their various versions of work.I showed her Elijah's preliminary structure.She read it without speaking.Then she put the phone down and looked at her coffee."You didn't have to do this," she said."I know," I said."I didn't ask for anything," she said."I know that too," I said. "That's partly why."She looked at the phone."It's significant," she said."Yes," I said."Sophia—""Lena," I said. "Your mother stole from my parents. The money that funded Diana's search for you, the money that paid Carter, all of it traced back to something that belonged to my family." I paused. "This isn't charity. This is just the right direction for something to travel."She was quiet for a long moment."I don

CHAPTER 66

Damien's POVI called Elijah before we came off the roof.He picked up on the first ring."I know," he said. "The detective called me thirty seconds ago.""What does it actually mean," I said. "Legally. The bigamy claim.""It means they've found something or fabricated something in the marriage records," he said. "Or they believe they have. The claim itself is not unusual as a delaying tactic. Challenge the heir's standing and you freeze the asset distribution while the court investigates the underlying claim.""How long does that take," I said."Months if they're lucky," he said. "Weeks if we move correctly." I heard him typing. "I need to see what they've actually submitted. The documentation behind the claim. Without that I can't assess how serious it is.""Get it," I said."Already requested," he said. "I'll have it by morning."I hung up and looked at Sophia.She was looking at the city with her hands in her pockets and her face doing the thing it did when something had landed an

CHAPTER 67

Sophia's POVThe hearing lasted less than an hour.Elijah placed the second marriage certificate on the screen. The false witness's story fell apart in the time it took the judge to read one sentence. By eleven o'clock it was over. My parents' marriage was confirmed. I was their daughter. Nothing about that had ever needed proving to me, but it was good to watch the world catch up.Outside the courthouse the sky was clear for the first time in weeks.Damien stood beside me on the steps. He didn't say anything about the case. He just looked at me the way he did when something in him had finally stopped holding its breath."It's over," he said."This part," I said.He looked at me for a long moment."Come with me," he said. "Not home. Somewhere else."I looked at him."Where," I said."You'll see," he said.He drove us out of the city, past the estate, further than either of us usually went without a reason. Forty minutes later he pulled into a small coastal town I had never been to, al

CHAPTER 68

Damien's POVI woke up before her, the way I usually did, but this time there was nowhere to be.No emails waiting. No board update. No unknown number with a warning attached to it. Just the sound of the water outside and Sophia asleep against my chest with her hair spread across the pillow in a way that made me want to stay exactly where I was for as long as possible.I stayed.She woke slowly, the way she did when nothing was demanding her attention, blinking at the light coming through the window before she registered where she was."We're still here," she said."We're still here," I said."No emergencies," she said."None," I said.She looked at me for a long moment, then smiled the real one, the one that started somewhere deeper than her face."I could get used to this," she said."I intend for you to," I said.We stayed in bed longer than either of us would have allowed ourselves a month ago. She traced the scar above my eyebrow with her finger and I told her the story again eve

CHAPTER 69

Sophia's POVWe stayed at the coast for four days.Not planned. Just extended, morning by morning, because neither of us found a good enough reason to leave and the estate, for once, didn't need us urgently enough to call us back.Damien checked his phone twice a day instead of every twenty minutes. That alone felt like proof something had shifted.On the third morning we walked further than usual, past the town, along a stretch of coast where the houses thinned out and the path became rougher and the water louder. He held my hand the whole way and didn't let go even when the path narrowed enough that walking side by side became difficult.We found a bench overlooking the water and sat there for a long time saying very little."I keep thinking about the foundation," I said eventually."Tell me," he said."I want the first grant to go somewhere specific," I said. "Not a broad opening call. I want it to go to someone who needs exactly what I needed. Somewhere to land.""Do you have some

CHAPTER 70

Sophia's POVTwo weeks passed the way weeks were supposed to pass. Ordinary. Full but not urgent.I split my time between the estate and the small lab space Knight the funding body had arranged, which turned out to be twenty minutes from Enough, close enough that Damien and I had already started planning weekends there without discussing it as a plan, just an assumption we both shared.The foundation launched quietly. No press conference, no gala. Just a website and an application process and Elijah drafting the legal structure with the same care he gave everything.The first grant went to a woman named Priya, twenty six years old, who had walked out of a marriage two months ago with nothing and had a design portfolio she hadn't touched in three years because her husband told her it was a waste of time. Elijah found her application in the first batch and flagged it specifically because something in the way she wrote reminded him, he said carefully, of someone else.I read her applicat

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