Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 141 - Chapitre 147

The phone buzzed against the nursery floor at ten past two.Marielle was folding a stack of Alex’s sleepers on the changing table, and for a moment she thought she had imagined it. Then it came again, low and insistent, from the bottom drawer, where she had hidden it under the baby blankets after the night Logan came home early.She looked toward the crib. Alex slept on his back with his fists up beside his face, perfectly still.She knelt, pulled the phone from beneath the blankets and carried it to the far corner of the nursery.“Hello.”“You answered quickly,” her father said.His voice was as calm as ever, low and even, the voice that had always made her feel as though she were standing very straight in a very small room.“You told me never to call you,” she whispered. “And now you’re calling me.”“Logan accepted five million dollars from a firm called Meridian Advisory.”Marielle’s hand went cold on the phone.“How do you know that?”He didn’t answer.“He told me it was private

The drive back to the Steele estate was quiet, but it wasn’t the old kind of quiet.Elara sat in the back seat with her coat around her shoulders, and Atlas sat beside her with his hand resting on the leather between them. His hand was close enough that she could feel the heat emitting from it, and her fingers could have touched his if she moved. She didn’t. She watched the city lights slide away through the window and felt every inch of space in the car.There was no folder in her lap and no phone buzzing with Dean’s name, unlike previous times.Curt drove with his eyes carefully on the road and his shoulders carefully elsewhere, and nobody mentioned Vane, or the lawsuit, or the man who had come into her house.It was strange, she realized. It was the first night since she had met Atlas that had nothing to do with business, or security, or revenge, or pretending.She didn’t know where to put her hands.The estate was dark when they arrived, with a few lamps glowing along the drive

Mina’s phone rang in the middle of a pin.“I’m so sorry.” She read the screen, and her face crumpled. “It’s my landlord, and he says my kitchen is flooding, but I’ll be ten minutes at most, I swear.”“Go,” Elara said. “I’ll manage.”“You’re half-zipped, I can’t just—”“It’s a zipper, Mina, go before your ceiling falls in.”Mina went, pausing at the door long enough to look back with enormous guilt. Then the studio was quiet.Elara stood before the tall mirror in the replacement evening dress, deep midnight blue with a back cut low to the waist, one side of the zipper still open. She reached for it, her fingers brushing fabric, but found nothing.“Wonderful,” she muttered.The door opened behind her.She saw Atlas in the mirror first, his coat over one arm, and she wished she had not turned. He had been odd since Thursday, quieter, watching her a moment longer than necessary whenever she spoke, and she hadn’t decided whether it was about Camille perched on his desk or something she c

The housekeeper was waiting in the front hall when they came in from the reception. She was wringing her hands in a way that made Elara’s stomach sink before she said a word.“Ma’am, I’m so sorry, there’s been a pipe leak,” she said. “The east guest suite flooded an hour ago, and the whole wing smells of wet plaster.”Elara still had her coat half off, and her lipstick, she suspected, was in considerably worse shape than when she had applied it. She was aware of Atlas beside her, very still, and of two footmen pretending to study the ceiling.“Is everything ruined?” she asked.“The bed and the rugs, ma’am, and we’ve prepared the north room instead, though it’s cold and the heating there is still being seen to, so I thought—”“She can use mine,” Atlas said.The hall went silent for a second as the housekeeper discovered a sudden fascination with her own hands, and the footmen stared straight at them.Somewhere down the corridor, a clock ticked.Atlas realized what he had said about on