บททั้งหมดของ Contracted to the wrong twin : บทที่ 101 - บทที่ 110

Chapter 102: The Chair RevealedThomas Reed answered the door before Ethan even knocked, which meant he'd been standing behind it, watching the drive, waiting."You got the text," Thomas said."Welcome to the family, Aldric's son." Ethan said it flat, tasting the strangeness of the words all over again. "You want to tell me who sent it?"Thomas stepped back to let them in without answering, and that silence told Ethan more than words would have. The house smelled like it always did — old paper and pipe smoke Thomas hadn't touched in years but somehow still clung to the walls — but tonight it felt different, like a room holding its breath.They sat at the same kitchen table where Thomas had first told them fragments of what he remembered, back when his memories were still scattered and half-erased, patched together from whatever the conspiracy hadn't managed to scrub clean. Elena set her laptop down but didn't open it. Some conversations, she'd learned, didn't want a screen between

Chapter 104: The Safe HouseEleanor left them with an address and nothing else — no explanation, no warning, just a scrap of paper with a location three hours north and a single line beneath it in handwriting too careful to be casual. Bring him. Only him. The rest of you can wait outside if you have to, but the door won't open for anyone but blood."That's not ominous at all," Elena muttered, reading over Ethan's shoulder.They drove through the night, Judith in the passenger seat with the address folded and refolded in her hands until the creases went soft, Elena in the back with her laptop open, trying and failing to find any public record of the coordinates Eleanor had given them. The building didn't exist on any map Elena could access — not on satellite records, not in county property databases, not in the aging archive of state infrastructure surveys she'd learned to dig through over the past several months. It was as if the location had been deliberately excised from every sy

Chapter 106: The CouncilThey made the drive back in under two hours, a trip that should have taken three, Ethan pushing the car past every speed he'd normally have talked himself out of. Judith sat rigid in the passenger seat with her phone clutched in both hands, refreshing a text thread with Nathaniel that refused to update fast enough to outrun the fear building in her chest.Found her, the message finally read, twenty minutes from the house. She's okay. She was in the garden the whole time — hiding, not taken. But someone was here and she saw them. She says they wanted her to come with them and she said no.The relief nearly buckled Judith in her seat, but it lasted only as long as it took her to read the rest of the message.She says one of them called her by a name that wasn't Lily.When they arrived, Lily was curled on the living room sofa under a blanket too big for her, Nathaniel sitting close enough that his knee touched hers, the posture of a man who had spent the las

Chapter 108: The Trap ClosesNobody slept that night, though they took turns pretending to.Ethan sat at the kitchen table with the lights off, watching the treeline through a gap in the curtains, while Marcus paced the length of the hallway like a man rehearsing an apology he knew wouldn't be enough. Judith had carried Lily up to the guest room hours ago, and every twenty minutes or so, Ethan heard the soft creak of the floorboards that meant Judith was checking on her again, unable to convince herself that a locked door and a sleeping child in the next room amounted to actual safety.It was Nathaniel who finally broke the silence, sometime after three, standing in the kitchen doorway with his phone in his hand and an expression that told Ethan the waiting was over before he said a single word."They know," Nathaniel said. "Marcus's cover is blown. I just got a message through a channel I haven't used in years — someone on the Council knows he came here, knows what he told you, an

Chapter 109: The ReckoningThey didn't hood him, which surprised Ethan more than it should have. They simply walked him through the dark, one man on either side gripping his arms with the bored efficiency of people who had done this enough times to find it routine, while a third followed a few paces behind with a flashlight trained steadily between Ethan's shoulder blades.He counted turns as they walked, out of some instinct he didn't examine too closely — left at the tree line, straight along what felt like an old service road, right through a gap in a hedge that scraped his arm hard enough to draw blood. It didn't matter, he suspected. Wherever they were taking him, it wasn't a place meant to be found by anyone following a trail of turns in the dark.The building they finally reached looked nothing like the concrete safe house from two nights ago. This one had lights on, warm ones, spilling gold across a gravel courtyard like something from an entirely different, gentler story