Lahat ng Kabanata ng MARRIED TO MY ENEMY’S SON: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

I didn’t sleep.Not for a single hour. I lay in the guest room of the Bellington penthouse staring at a ceiling that cost more than my family’s entire apartment, listening to the silence on the other side of the wall and trying to convince myself that I was fine. That this was just another night. That tomorrow would simply be another day to endure, and the day after that, and the day after that until the clock ran out and I could finally walk away from all of this with my family’s name and dignity intact.But the silence kept pressing in. And Adrian Bellington’s voice kept finding its way back to me.Of yourself.I turned onto my side, pulling the sheets tighter. The guest room was beautiful in the way that all things Bellington were beautiful cold, deliberate, designed to impress rather than comfort. The linens were thread counts I couldn’t name, the furniture dark mahogany with clean, architectural lines. A painting on the wall abstract, expensive, soulless. Everything about this pl

Thursday came faster than I expected.I spent Wednesday evening in the penthouse going through the board file Adrian had left me, cross-referencing names against everything I already knew about Bellington Holdings which was more than most people would have assumed. I had spent years after my father’s death quietly educating myself on the company that had destroyed him. I knew the key shareholders. I knew which board members had been in place when the fraud accusations were filed and which had joined afterward. I knew who had voted to proceed with the case against my father and who had abstained.Knowledge, as my father had always said, was the only currency that couldn’t be taken from you.He didn’t pick me because he wanted me. He picked me because I was desperate enough to say yes. Adrian’s words from the first night hadn’t left me. I had turned them over a hundred times since then, examining them the way you examine something that has cut you not to dwell on the wound, but to un

The car ride home from the gala was silent.Not the uncomfortable silence of the first night, charged with electricity and unspoken hostility. This was something different. Quieter. More careful. The kind of silence that settles between two people after something has shifted between them and neither one is quite ready to name it.I sat with my hands folded in my lap and watched the city blur past the window, still wearing the emerald gown, the borrowed diamonds cool against my collarbone. The gala had run past midnight. The chandeliers and the champagne and the two hundred watching eyes felt very far away now.Adrian sat beside me in the dark, tie loosened, jacket unbuttoned at the collar. He hadn’t spoken since we’d left the ballroom. Neither had I.Marcus pulled the car into the underground garage. We rode the elevator to the penthouse in silence. The doors opened. We stepped inside.I took off my heels at the entrance a small, deliberate act of reclaiming something ordinary and c

I found Vera Adeyemi on a Tuesday.Not through any dramatic investigation through Priya, who maintained Adrian’s social calendar with the meticulous efficiency of someone who had been doing it long enough to anticipate needs before they were spoken. I had asked, casually, whether the Foundation had any upcoming events that former board-adjacent figures might attend. Priya had produced a list within the hour. Vera Adeyemi, now semi-retired from corporate consulting, sat on the advisory committee of a financial literacy nonprofit that the Bellington Foundation had co-sponsored for the past four years.There was a lunch. Next Thursday. Twelve people. Riverside restaurant, private dining room.I told Adrian that evening in the study.He looked at the details I’d printed and set them on the desk. Looked at them for a long moment without speaking. Then he looked up at me.“You move fast,” he said.“I move when there’s something to move toward.”Something at the corner of his mouth shifted.

We came home from Dubai on a Sunday.The flight was quiet. Adrian worked through most of it reviewing legal documents, responding to messages, doing the ten thousand things that running a company the size of Bellington Holdings apparently required even at thirty thousand feet. I sat beside him and read, or tried to, and watched the clouds shift and thin outside the window and thought about Orion’s face in the gallery courtyard when he had said: Your father was a good man.The envelope sat in my bag. I had not opened it on the flight. I had not opened it in Dubai, not that night in the hotel suite when I had sat on the edge of the bed with it in my hands for a long time before setting it on the nightstand. I was not ready for it yet. I understood this about myself without judgment some things you need to circle before you can enter them. Some truths are too heavy to absorb standing still.I would open it at home.Home. I noticed the word and let it settle without examining it too clos