All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Wife Revenge Plot : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Max called on a Tuesday evening, his voice carrying a particular urgency that had me on my feet before he'd finished the first sentence."We found them," he said. "An apartment in Queens, under a name we finally managed to trace through a utility bill. I have surveillance confirming both Julian and Cassidy are currently residing there. And Lily…" he paused, something careful entering his voice, “..we have audio. A domestic dispute, picked up through a listening device we placed as part of standard surveillance protocol. I think you need to hear it before we decide how to proceed."My chest tightened immediately. "Send it to me.""Are you certain? It's difficult listening.""Send it, Max." My voice came out sharper than I intended, months of desperate searching finally reaching some kind of breaking point. "I need to know. Whatever it is, I need to know."He was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line, and I understood, in that particular pause, that he was weighing his own dis

Alena had grown so much since that single, devastating glimpse of her at the funeral, nearly a year old now, though she still felt impossibly small every time I lifted her from her crib each morning. Dark curls had filled in properly, framing a face that carried pieces of both her parents in ways that still occasionally caught me off guard, Julian's eyes, dark and serious, but a particularly determined set to her small chin that felt entirely, unmistakably her own. She could pull herself up along the edge of furniture now, unsteady but determined, and had recently discovered the particular joy of pulling every single book off the lowest shelf in the nursery with a focused, methodical persistence that made both Alexander and me laugh helplessly despite the mess it created. She didn't know me yet. Not really. I understood that, intellectually, even as the reality of it ached every single day. She'd spent the first months of her life with Cassidy, whatever complicated affection that wo

Alena's fever started sometime after midnight, a low warmth against my palm when I checked on her before finally trying to sleep myself, nothing alarming enough to wake anyone over. I remembered standing over her crib for a moment longer than usual, some quiet unease I couldn't fully name keeping me there before I finally talked myself into believing it was nothing.By three in the morning, it had climbed high enough that her whimpering pulled me fully out of sleep, and I found her thrashing weakly in her crib, her small body burning against my hands the moment I lifted her."Alexander." My voice came out sharp with panic, loud enough to have him beside me within seconds. "She's burning up. Something's wrong."He was already moving, pulling on clothes with the particular efficient speed I remembered from every other crisis we'd survived together, and within minutes we were in the car, Alena wrapped tightly against my chest in the back seat, her small cries weak and exhausted in a way

I had held onto sanity by the thinnest possible thread these past several days, watching my daughter fight her way slowly back from something that never should have touched her at all. I'd stopped properly tracking the hours somewhere around the second sleepless night, existing instead in the particular fractured time of hospital rooms, measured not in minutes but in monitor readings, doctor's rounds, the small, precious increments of Alena's slow, careful improvement. But something had finally shifted. She was responding now, small, tentative signs of the child I remembered from before this whole terrifying ordeal began, her eyes tracking movement across the room with genuine curiosity rather than the glassy, fevered exhaustion of the days before. When she woke that morning, her small voice reaching me before I'd even fully opened my eyes, she'd reached both arms out toward me with an urgency that undid whatever composure I'd managed to hold together through the long night. "Mama,"

Alena had settled fully into health over the following two weeks, her small body recovering with the particular resilient speed only children seemed capable of, until the fear I'd carried through those terrible hospital days finally began loosening its grip on my chest entirely. I'd spent those two weeks working remotely, unwilling to leave her side even after the doctors had cleared her fully, letting Alexander gently coax me back toward the office only once I'd properly convinced myself she was truly, completely alright. I returned to Wood Industries on a Monday morning, dressed carefully in the navy suit that had become something close to armour over these past several months, and found my desk buried beneath the particular chaos of two weeks' worth of decisions no one else had felt authorised to make in my absence. "Welcome back," Patricia said, appearing in my doorway with a stack of files thick enough to make my stomach sink slightly. "How is she?" "Recovering beautifully," I