Todos os capítulos de The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood : Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 79

POV: DamienI stood in my office for a long time after she’d gone.The door clicked shut behind Victoria, leaving the room exactly as it had been before she entered, but it felt different now. Quieter. Heavier. The air conditioner hummed above me, cold air brushing against my skin while the city stretched beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, lights scattered beneath the darkening sky. Far below, traffic moved through the streets in slow lines of red and white, but up here, the office felt too quiet.I wasn’t processing it.I’d already processed it. That had taken about thirty seconds. The situation had been clear before Victoria had even finished speaking, and there had only been one possible response.What I was doing was something else.I stood in the quiet of my office, the city moving beyond the windows and the meeting room down the corridor still holding the remains of an evening that had turned into something I

‎POV: Victoria‎I drove home too fast.‎Not dangerously. Just faster than I usually drove, the kind of speed that comes from needing movement to do something with what’s sitting in your chest, from needing the city to blur slightly at the edges so you have something to look at that isn’t the inside of your own head.‎The office had been empty when I left.‎I’d walked out without looking back, which was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and I’d maintained that all the way to the elevator and through the lobby and to my car, and I’d completely keep myself together, every step of it, because composure was something I could do in my sleep and I was not going to give the building the satisfaction of falling apart in it.‎I fell apart in the car.‎Not visibly. Not dramatically. Just a long slow exhale that came from somewhere deep enough that my hands loosened on the steering wheel and I had to tighten them again deliberately, and a specific

‎POV: Sebastian‎She was easier to read than I’d expected.‎Not in a way that made her simple, Victoria Whitmore was not simple, I’d done enough research to understand that clearly before I sent the message last night. But she was readable in the way that people were predictable when they were carrying something heavy and hadn’t yet found the right place to set it down. The weight showed in small things, the way she'd held her glass, the slight tightening around her eyes when I said it wasn’t her fault, the specific quality of her silence when I said it, sitting with the sentence rather than deflecting it the way someone without that particular wound would have.‎She’d been hurt last night.‎Not just the rejection, though that was there too, I’d have been able to see that even without the information I already had. Something deeper than the rejection. Something about what the rejection confirmed, about what it told her about her own position in a situation

POV: CharlotteThe building looked different from the inside.I’d built a whole picture of it from the outside over months, the brass plaque, the particular way Damien walked out of those doors with something quieter in him than when he’d gone in, and the inside didn’t match any of it. Clean, softly lit, deliberately unintimidating, and I walked through it beside him for the first time and kept my face easy.Keller was slight, late forties, careful in the way of someone who had delivered difficult news for long enough that precision and gentleness had become the same instinct. He shook my hand and said he was glad I’d come and I believed him, and we sat down and he opened the file.Forty minutes.That was how long it took, and in forty minutes I understood the situation more precisely than I had from months of observation and overheard phone calls and late night conversations combined. Keller spoke in the language of medicine and I stopped him tw

‎POV: Charlotte‎Eleanor called on a Tuesday, which wasn’t unusual but what was unusual was that she called my phone instead of Damien’s.‎I was in the library when it rang, my notebook open but not moving the way it moved on good days, and I looked at the screen and felt the tension that Eleanor’s name always produced in me, the sense of needing to be fully present rather than half in whatever I’d been thinking about before.‎”Charlotte,” she said, when I answered. “Do you have a few minutes?”‎”Of course,” I said.‎She didn’t ask about the foundation or the upcoming calendar or any of the things she sometimes used as the opening of a conversation before she got to what she actually wanted to say. She went straight to it, which told me she’d been thinking about this call for a while before making it.‎”How is he?” she said. “Actually. I don’t want to hear the usual response he use to give whenever I ask him”‎I sat back in the reading chair.