Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Discarded Heiress: Married To My Ex Fiancé’s Brother: Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

LenoraThere was a particular smell the studio had in the mornings before anyone else arrived — raw cotton and cedar dye blocks and the faint metallic tang of the industrial steamer warming up in the back room — and I'd started showing up early just to stand in it for a few minutes before the day properly began.I hadn't expected to fall in love with fabric. That was the embarrassing, slightly ridiculous truth of it. I'd started this business half out of spite, half out of some desperate need to have one single thing in my life that nobody had handed me, arranged for me, or taken away from me without asking. I hadn't expected the actual work — the swatches, the dye baths, the endless, maddening trial and error of getting a sustainable weave to hold its structure without collapsing into something that looked like a dishrag — to become the thing I thought about in the shower. The thing I woke up excited about. The thing that had nothing to do with Elias, or Liam, or my parents, or any v

EliasI woke up to find Lenora had drawn a small, extremely unflattering cartoon of my face on the back of a fabric swatch and left it propped against my coffee mug like a greeting card.The eyebrows were doing something genuinely concerning. I had never once in my life made that expression. I was fairly sure it was anatomically impossible."This is slander," I said, when she wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later, hair still damp, wearing one of my shirts with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows like she'd actively tried to make the theft as visible as possible."It's art.""It's a war crime.""You're being dramatic." She stole the mug out of my hand, took a sip, made a face, and handed it back without apology, which had become something of a ritual between us at this point — she hated black coffee, tried it anyway every single morning, and was somehow always surprised. "Also, that's exactly the face you made last night when Theo texted me about the dye shipment.""I don't r

LenoraThree weeks out from launch, I had officially entered what Reese had taken to calling my "feral seamstress era" — surviving on iced coffee, running on four hours of sleep, and apparently incapable of finishing a sentence without circling back to hemlines.Which was exactly the state I was in when Lily walked back into my life for the second time."I know this is forward," she said, hovering just inside the studio door with the same easy, practiced warmth from her first phone call months ago, "but I saw the launch announcement go up this morning, and I figured — worst case, you say no again, and I've only wasted one afternoon instead of pretending I'm not disappointed about it for a week."I should have felt the same prickle of unease I had the first time. I mostly just felt exhausted."You have logistics experience," I said, more statement than question, trying to remember the exact pitch from that first call."Five years. Supply chains, vendor management, the stuff nobody want

LenoraTwo days before launch, Elias showed up at my studio with four security guards, a clipboard, and absolutely no intention of asking my opinion about any of it."What is this," I said, stepping out from behind the rack of nearly-finished gowns to find my front door propped open and two men in dark suits already running wand scanners over the delivery entrance like they were sweeping for explosives instead of standing in a room full of silk."Security upgrade." Elias didn't even look up from his clipboard. "Effective immediately. I've had the team map every entry point in the building. We're installing additional cameras over the storage room tonight, and I want a formal check-in log for every person who walks through that door starting this afternoon.""You want a what.""A check-in log." He finally looked at me, and I could see the exhaustion underneath the composure, the particular strain of a man who hadn't slept properly in days. "Lenora, I told you there was a flagged paymen

Chapter Seventy Lenora The paramedics were still running tests on me when I noticed Elias hadn’t said a word in nearly twenty minutes. He sat beside the hospital bed, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped so tightly that his knuckles were beginning to turn white. Every so often, his eyes would lift to check on me before dropping back to the floor, his jaw tightening as though he were biting back words he didn’t want to bring himself to say. I wanted to ask him what was wrong, to reach for his hand and tell him I was okay, that everything was going to be okay. But the truth was, I didn’t know if I was okay anymore… or if anything was. I’d smooth it out while keeping your original wording, the emotional weight, and that sense of shock and helplessness. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what had happened. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw it all over again. The orange flames climbing up the storage room walls. The thick, black smoke swallowing the studio. My ha