Todos os capítulos de HIS SECRET HEIR : Capítulo 41 - Capítulo 50

The Chess KingIsabella stood frozen beside Ethan’s bed.The black chess king sat on the bedside table exactly where it should not have been. Matte. Heavy-looking. Placed with deliberate care only inches from her sleeping son’s head. The lamp was off. The room was dark except for the thin spill of light from the hallway. Ethan’s soft breathing was the only sound.Her hands shook as she reached for him.“Ethan. Baby, wake up.”He stirred, blinking slowly, paper dinosaur still tucked under one arm.“Mommy?”“Did anyone come into your room?”Ethan shook his head, still half-asleep. “No.”“Did you wake up during the night?”He frowned, thinking the way he always did when he tried to remember something important.“I heard someone.”Isabella’s heart stopped.“What did you hear?”Ethan looked up at her with open, innocent eyes.“Someone moving outside.”The words landed like ice water.Isabella pulled him into her arms at once, holding him tight against her chest. She kept her voice calm for

The Man Who Knows Too MuchThe lockdown entered its third day with no relief.Gates remained sealed. Staff continued to be questioned in rotating groups. Every access log was re-examined. Dante worked through the electronic side of the three-minute camera blind spot without sleep. Enzo and Marco handled the physical searches and the repeated interviews. The black chess king stayed locked in the main study under constant watch, the tiny engraved symbol photographed from every angle.Alessandro began the trace on the chess set himself.He contacted the Italian workshop through secure channels. The manufacturer was polite, precise, and carefully limited in what they were willing to share. The sets had been produced more than a decade earlier as a private commission series. Only twelve existed. Each had been sold through closed intermediaries to keep the buyers’ identities discreet. The workshop confirmed the custom symbol had been requested for one specific set and added by hand to every

Too CloseIsabella started avoiding him the morning after the kiss.It was not dramatic. She simply chose different corridors. She timed her visits to the medical wing for the hours she knew he would be in meetings. When they ended up in the same room she kept Ethan between them or found a reason to step away. Her body still remembered everything, the solid weight of him when he had shielded her on the terrace, the heat of his mouth, the way her pulse had jumped hard against her throat when he pressed closer. The memory lived under her skin like a second heartbeat she could not silence.Alessandro noticed within the first day.He did not chase her.He did not call her into the study or invent reasons to cross her path. He simply watched from a distance, the same controlled way he watched every other threat and change inside his walls, and let the space she needed remain open.The lockdown continued. The estate stayed sealed. Questioning of staff rotated through another round. Dante ke

Five Years AgoThe secondary wing felt smaller every time Richard was brought back into it for questioning.The guards waited outside. The door stayed closed. Isabella stood near the narrow window with her arms folded. Alessandro remained by the wall, silent, listening to every word. The two silver cufflinks and the black chess king had already forced too many buried pieces into the light. Richard could no longer keep the rest locked away.He sat on the edge of the chair with his hands clasped between his knees and finally began.“Five years ago, shortly after you disappeared from the hotel and from the Moreau estate, I received a warning. It did not come through ordinary channels. No phone call that could be traced. No letter with a return address. It was delivered in person by a man I had only seen once before, in that old photograph with the scratched-out face. He told me someone knew you had been with Alessandro De Luca that night. They knew you had taken him into your body. They

The Missing GuestAlessandro barely left the study for the next two days.The erased name from the hotel floor had become the only thing that mattered. He slept in short stretches on the couch against the wall, if he slept at all. Coffee cups stacked on the corner of the desk. The two cufflinks and the black chess king stayed locked in the side drawer, but the blank line on the final hotel record stayed in the center of the table under the lamp.Marco worked beside him most of the hours. The reservation payment had moved through six different shell companies before it disappeared into a private trust that no longer existed on paper. Each company led to another. Each trail was designed to waste time. Marco followed them anyway, quiet and methodical, pulling what records still existed from old banking archives and quiet contacts who preferred not to have their names written down.“They’re good,” Marco said once, late on the second night. “But they’re not perfect. There’s a pattern in t