Semua Bab Chasing The Wife He Discarded: Bab 81 - Bab 90

Lysander's POVI heard about Seraphina. Police had picked her up at a hotel, caught with another man, the whole thing already spreading through channels I didn't fully understand yet. My father called first, furious and confused in equal measure."Do you know anything about this?" he demanded, no greeting, straight into it. "The police, Lysander. At a hotel.""I'm finding out the same time you are.""That's not an answer.""It's the only one I have right now, Dad."He hung up without saying a word, which told me everything about how well that conversation had actually gone. My mother called right after, crying, asking questions I didn't have answers for, wanting to know if her son was safe, if any of this touched him directly, if I needed her to come."I'm fine, Mom. I'll call you back once I know more.""Promise me you're not involved in whatever this is."I didn't have a clean answer for that either, so I just told her I loved her and hung up before she could ask again.I sat on the

Seraphina's POVThe holding cell smelled like bleach and old coffee. I sat on the edge of the metal bench, wrists still faintly marked from the cuffs, and stared at a wall that gave me absolutely nothing to work with.No audience. No one to manage, no face to arrange for anyone watching.That was the part that scared me most, if I let myself actually feel it. Five years of knowing exactly what expression to wear in every room, and now there was no one left to perform for except myself, and I didn't have the first idea what that version of me even looked like anymore.I thought about Etienne, two cells over, probably terrified out of his mind. He'd never signed up for any of this. He knew I was married, knew there were complications he wasn't allowed to ask about, but he'd never once imagined complications like this. I felt something for him I didn't examine too closely. Guilt, maybe. Or just the ordinary sadness of losing one of the only rooms in my life where I hadn't needed to lie a

Seraphina's POVA guard came for me just after breakfast, tray of something gray and untouched still sitting on the little metal shelf where I'd left it."Your mother's here."I sat up straighter than I meant to, some old habit of wanting to look presentable even now, even in a room with nothing but a mirror I couldn't reach and a jumpsuit that didn't fit right. I ran a hand through my hair, useless as the gesture was, and followed the guard down a hallway.They walked me into the same small room I'd sat in with the lawyer yesterday, same metal table bolted to the floor, same two chairs facing each other like the whole space had been built for exactly this kind of conversation and nothing else.She looked older than she had a few weeks ago, sitting across from me in that same tired room, hands twisted tight together on the table, a scarf pulled up too high around her neck for the weather outside. My mother had never been a woman who hid things well."Mom.""Seraphina." Her voice crack

Nerissa's POVThe courtroom felt smaller than I remembered courtrooms being. Wood paneling, hard benches, a judge who'd clearly seen every trick lawyers had ever tried to pull and had stopped being impressed by any of them years ago.I'd barely slept the night before, running through every piece of evidence Rousseau had laid out for me, telling myself it was enough. Sitting in that hard chair now, watching the prosecutor shuffle through his notes, I wasn't sure I believed that anymore.Rousseau stood at the table beside me, folder open, voice steady even as the morning went from bad to worse one ruling at a time."Counsel," the judge said, peering over her glasses at the prosecutor. "This does not connect her to hiring anyone. I need more than proximity.""Your Honor, taken together with the text records""Taken together with text records that reference no explicit plan, no named target, and no confirmed recipient identity, I'm not seeing conspiracy. I'm seeing two women complaining a

Nerissa's POVClosing arguments took less time than I expected. The prosecutor kept his short and pointed, leaning hard on Lysander's testimony, the one clean piece of proof in a case built mostly out of shadows. Talia's lawyer argued reasonable doubt, secondhand testimony, a brother whose loyalties couldn't possibly be trusted anymore given everything else going on in his life.I watched the judge's face the whole time, looking for any sign of which way this was leaning, and found nothing. She'd built a career, apparently, on giving nothing away."I'll return with a ruling in twenty minutes," she said, and left the bench without another word.Twenty minutes stretched longer than any twenty minutes I'd lived through in years.I sat between Lucien and Rousseau, Lysander two rows behind us with his parents, close enough that I could feel his presence without needing to turn around and check. Nobody talked much. Rousseau kept flipping through his notes out of pure nervous habit, nothing