Semua Bab Chasing The Wife He Discarded: Bab 61 - Bab 70

Nerissa's POVNicole was at the kitchen table when I came down, swinging her legs off the chair, a bowl of cereal going soggy in front of her while she stared at the tablet propped against the sugar bowl."Nicole, put that away before breakfast.""Nicky's watching sharks again." She didn't look up. "Can we go see real ones sometime? Like at an aquarium?""Maybe this weekend.""You always say maybe.""Because I mean maybe." I kissed the top of her head, checked that the tablet was actually showing sharks and not something worse. I hung up on Lysander and sat there a second, before I called Priya.She picked up before the first ring finished. "I saw it.""How bad.""Bad enough that I've had three outlets call in the last twenty minutes." Papers shuffled on her end, fast. "Most of it's the usual. Old marriage, mystery meeting, is she still in love with him. That kind of thing sells itself.""And the rest of it?"She went quiet for half a second too long."Priya.""One outlet's running a

Lysander's POVI found her in the bedroom, just sitting on the edge of the bed scrolling through her phone."We need to talk," I said."Do we." She didn't look up."Seraphina."She set the phone down slow, finally meeting my eyes. "Fine. Talk."I'd rehearsed this in the car. Rousseau's careful words, the ones meant to scare her just enough without giving away how much we actually knew. Standing here now, all of it felt clumsy in my mouth."I know about Whitfield," I said. "The transfers. Kessler.I know you're not pregnant.I know it's not the first time you've done this."Something flickered behind her eyes, gone fast."That's quite a story.""It's not a story.""Prove it, then.""I don't need to prove it to you. I already have people who can." I kept my voice even, the way Rousseau told me to. "What I need is for you to think carefully about who you're protecting right now, because whoever it is, they've already decided you're expendable."I expected fear. Tears. The version of her

Nerissa's POV Priya called back just before midnight. "We found the car," she said. I sat up straight. "Where." "Private airfield outside the city. Small one, mostly used for charter flights. Her car's still parked in the lot." "She flew somewhere." "Looks that way. I'm pulling the manifest now." Papers shuffled fast on her end. "It's going to take a minute. These charter places don't exactly hand out passenger lists to anyone who asks nicely." "Make them hand it out." "Working on it." I paced the length of my office, phone pressed to my ear, waiting. "Nerissa." Priya's voice came back careful, the way it always did right before she said something I wasn't going to like. "The flight logged out two hours ago. Destination filed as Luxembourg." Something cold settled low in my stomach. "Same jurisdiction as the shell company," I said. "Same jurisdiction as half of Rousset's known holdings." A pause. "She's not running from him, Nerissa. She's running to him." I

Nerissa's POVLysander called just after two in the morning. Nothing at the house, he said. He'd gone through her closet, her desk, even the lining of her bags. No laptop, no second phone, nothing that looked like it belonged to anyone but the woman she'd pretended to be for five years."She was careful," he said, tired in a way that went past the hour. "Wherever she kept her real life, it wasn't here.""Keep looking anyway. Anything, even something small.""I will."I hung up and sat with that a moment, tired down to my bones.Lucien found me still at my desk an hour later, coffee gone cold beside me, the Luxembourg manifest pulled up on my screen for the tenth time like staring at it long enough might change what it said."Still nothing?" he asked."Still nothing. Charter company says she boarded. No record of her landing.""That's not possible. A plane doesn't just disappear.""I know that."He came around the desk and looked at the screen himself, jaw tight."Let me handle this,"

Lysander's POVRousseau's people found the address by noon. A property registered to an aunt on her mother's side, tucked outside a town so small it barely had a name on the map. Nerissa wanted to send Lucien's contacts.I told her I was going myself."That's not smart," she said, over the phone, tired in a way that made even her arguing sound worn thin."I don't care if it's smart. I'm the reason she ran. I'm going to be the one who finds her."She didn't fight me on it for long. I think some part of her understood, even if she'd never say it out loud.The house sat back from the road, small, shutters closed, a single car in the drive that didn't match anything registered to Seraphina. I parked down the street and walked the rest of the way, heart going harder than it should have for a woman I used to share a bed with.An older woman answered the door. Seraphina's aunt, I guessed, from the sharp set of her jaw, the same one Seraphina got when she was deciding whether to lie to me."C