Semua Bab I Buried My Fiancé, Married His Brother: Bab 21 - Bab 30

Christabel "You're doing it wrong," Jane informed me, with the total, merciless confidence only a four year old can summon at seven in the morning. "I am not doing it wrong. This is exactly how you make pancakes." "Papa flips them higher." "Papa," Sebastian said from the doorway, sounding entirely too amused for a man who'd been up half the night reading financial records, "does not, in fact, flip them higher. Papa buys them frozen and puts them in the toaster." "Traitor," I said, without turning around, because the pan currently had my full attention, mostly because the last pancake had somehow ended up stuck to the ceiling fan, and I was determined this one would land somewhere edible. "I'm just saying, you've set a bar my daughter now expects me to clear, and I have never once cleared it." "Then maybe you should have learned to cook before agreeing to marry someone who apparently can't either." "I never claimed I could cook. I claimed I could burn eggs with impressive consis

Christabel Sophie spread three documents across the desk, each one thicker than the last, and I watched Sebastian's face go carefully blank in the way I was learning meant he was bracing for something. "Your father's original will," Sophie said, tapping the first document. "Standard enough on its surface. Full control of Vettel Corp to you, provisions for Jane, a smaller allowance for Beatrix and, at the time, for Gabriel. But there's a codicil, added eight months before your father died, that nobody in our legal team had cause to look at closely, because on paper it looked like a standard contingency clause." "What does it say," Sebastian asked, voice tight. "It says that full, unconditional control of Vettel Corp only transfers to you if, at the time of your father's death or within five years following it, you are, in the codicil's words, quote, married in a legitimate and enduring union, unquote. If that condition isn't met, control defaults to a family trust, managed jointly b

Christabel Jane's room looked exactly the way it should have, except for the one detail that mattered, the window cracked open to the freezing afternoon air, the curtain moving slightly in a breeze that had no business being inside that apartment at all. "She can't have climbed out," I said, my voice coming out high and fast, panic already clawing up my throat. "She's four, Sebastian, she can't reach a window that high, she can't have—" "I know." His voice was tight, controlled in a way that frightened me more than if he'd been screaming, the sound of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will. "Odette, call security, all of them, tell them to check every floor, every exit, every camera in the building. Now." Odette bolted from the room, and Sebastian crossed to the window, checking the latch with hands that weren't quite steady despite his voice, and I stood frozen in the doorway for one useless, terrifying second before my body finally caught up with my fear and I

Christabel Beatrix looked different in the morning light, older somehow, sitting in the same chair she'd occupied during our first uncomfortable tea, except this time she was the one who'd asked us both to be there. "Thank you for coming," she said, and her voice had lost its usual precision, something rawer underneath it that put me immediately on edge. "You said there were things about this family's history we should know," Sebastian said, no patience left for pleasantries after the night we'd had. "Start talking, Beatrix." She folded her hands in her lap, and for a long moment she said nothing at all, staring at some fixed point on the carpet like she was gathering courage from it. "I married your father for the reasons everyone assumes," she said finally. "Security. Status. I won't pretend otherwise, not anymore, not after everything that's happened. But I want you to understand something, Sebastian. Whatever I've done since, however calculating I've become, I did love your fa

Christabel The apartment building was unremarkable in every way, the kind of place you'd walk past a hundred times without noticing, tucked between a boulangerie and a shuttered pharmacy on a narrow street that smelled like fresh bread and old rain. "You're sure this is the address," I asked, huddled deeper into my coat against the cold, watching Sebastian check his phone for what felt like the tenth time in ten minutes. "This is where the account access pinged from, both times. It's not confirmation she lives here. It could be a café with public wifi, a friend's place, anything." He pocketed the phone, his eyes scanning the street with the same careful, controlled focus I'd started to recognize as his version of barely contained fear. "We're not going to knock on doors. I just wanted to see it myself before deciding what to do next." "That's very restrained of you, for a man who wanted to storm his stepmother's office two weeks ago." "I've learned some restraint costs less than a