All Chapters of You Buried Your Wife, Mr. Hayes. Now Beg.: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Diego POV Days after the funeral, I drove out to the salvage yard where they'd towed what was left of Aysha's car. I found the manager near the office trailer and told him I was there on behalf of the insurance company. "I just need twenty minutes with the vehicle," I said, sliding a folded bill into his hand before he could ask which company. He glanced at the cash, then back at me. "Take your time. Nobody has touched it since it came in." I spent those twenty minutes photographing every angle of the wreckage before the police could get there and do the same. I was looking for proof, and I wasn't leaving without it. The front end was destroyed, the kind of damage that matched being struck hard from behind at high speed. But it was the underside that told the real story. I crouched down, flashlight in hand, and ran my fingers along the brake line until I found exactly what I'd already suspected I would. It had been cut clean. "Somebody didn't just run her off the road," I said u

Seraphine POV The office smelled like burnt coffee and printer ink, and I'd been staring at the same spreadsheet for four hours straight, my eyes burning from the glare of the monitor. "You're doing it wrong," a voice said behind me. I didn't turn around. "I'm aware, Marcus. That's why I'm still sitting here." Marcus Whitfield had been Diego's mentor once, a man who built and lost three companies before he turned forty and decided the only thing worth doing with the rest of his life was teaching people who actually listened. Diego had brought me to him eight months ago with nothing but a folder of documents and a single request. Teach her everything. Marcus dropped into the chair across from my desk and spun my laptop toward himself, scanning the numbers with the kind of speed that still made me feel slow no matter how much I'd already learned. "Your margin calculations are fine," he said, tapping the screen. "Your problem is you're thinking like an employee. You're trying to ma

Adrian POV Three months later, I sat on the couch with the television playing low in the background, half listening while I scrolled through my phone. "In tonight's business spotlight," the anchor said, her voice bright and rehearsed, "Vale Empire has officially become the fastest growing conglomerate on the continent, with holdings in logistics, real estate, tech, and luxury retail. And yet, two years after its founding, the identity of its owner, known only as S. Vale, remains one of the best kept secrets in the industry." I sat forward, the phone forgotten in my hand. The screen cut to a graphic, a chart climbing steadily upward year over year, stock tickers scrolling beneath a skyline shot of Vale Tower, lit up gold against the night sky. No photograph. No face. Just numbers, and the kind of numbers that made my stomach tighten every time I saw them, because every single one of those gains had come at the direct expense of companies like mine. "Analysts estimate her personal w

Seraphine POV I heard the glass shatter before I saw who it belonged to, and some quiet, satisfied part of me already knew. I kept my expression exactly how I'd trained it to be, calm, pleasant, unreadable, while two hundred pairs of eyes tracked the sound to its source and found Adrian Hayes standing frozen near the center of the ballroom, champagne pooling around his shoes, his face drained of every ounce of color it had held thirty seconds earlier. Five years. I had waited five years for this exact moment, had rehearsed it in my head more times than I could count, standing in front of Diego's cracked bathroom mirror at two in the morning, in the back of black cars between meetings, in the quiet hour before sleep when the old fear still sometimes crept back in no matter how much armor I'd built over it. I had expected to feel something enormous. Rage, maybe. Grief, still raw somewhere underneath everything else. Some part of me had even prepared for the possibility that I'd feel

Adrian POV After a few minutes of waiting for Seraphine Vale to reappear from wherever she'd vanished to after her introduction, she finally emerged, moving with that same unhurried, deliberate stride. A small cluster of executives immediately converged on her, all vying for a handshake, a word, a fraction of her attention. I watched her navigate them with practiced ease, gracious but firm, never lingering too long with any single person. One man tried to press a business card into her hand, and she took it with a polite nod before passing it wordlessly to an assistant trailing a few steps behind her. Another woman leaned in to say something that made Seraphine laugh, a short, controlled sound that didn't quite reach her eyes. Eventually she extracted herself from the cluster and began moving toward the private elevator bank on the far side of the ballroom, clearly heading for an exit that wasn't meant for the rest of us. I followed before I could think better of it. I found her n