Todos los capítulos de His Substitute Bride Became His Obsession: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

I stared at the message until Adrian’s pacing finally broke my concentration, his footsteps sharp against the waiting room tile like a countdown to something none of us were ready for.*The baby isn’t Damian’s. But by the time the test results confirm that, the damage to his reputation will already be done. That was always the point.*I turned the phone toward Adrian without a word, watching his face cycle through confusion, then dawning horror as he read it.“Who’s sending you this?” he demanded.“I don’t know. It’s the second one.” My hands had gone cold around the phone. “The first one was about Marianne Cole. This person seems to know things before they happen, or at least before the rest of us catch up.”Adrian sank into a plastic waiting room chair, his composure finally cracking entirely. “She used me. This whole time, Evelyn. I thought, god, I actually thought we were building something real together.”Something bitter rose in my throat, old grief tangled with a strange, unexp

We worked through the night, the study slowly filling with the debris of preparation, coffee cups and printed documents and the particular exhaustion that comes from racing a clock you can’t slow down, no matter how badly you want to buy yourself just a few more hours.“Walk me through it again,” Damian said, pacing behind Oliver Hayes, who sat hunched over the desk with a legal pad covered in his own rapid, slanted handwriting. “What can they actually vote on tomorrow?”“Legally, an emergency motion filed with proper signatures grants the board authority to vote on leadership changes, provided the required percentage of shareholders approve the acceleration.” Oliver didn’t look up from his notes. “The concerning part isn’t the meeting itself. It’s who filed the motion.”“And we still don’t know,” I said, watching exhaustion carve deeper lines into Damian’s face with every passing hour.“We know it wasn’t Richard,” Noah said from his corner of the room, three screens glowing in front

I stared at the message the entire ride home, the boardroom’s victory curdling into something anxious and unresolved sitting heavy in my stomach.Damian noticed. He always noticed, the particular attentiveness that had become as familiar to me as his voice, and he reached for my hand the moment we settled into the car.“What’s wrong?”I held out the phone without a word, watching the same careful blankness settle over his face that I’d learned to recognize as him bracing for impact.“There was a fire,” he said quietly, before I could ask. “At the property where Marianne’s mother relocated to, years ago. I was seventeen. I’d gone to see Marianne, against my father’s explicit instructions, the week before everything fully unraveled.”“What happened?”“I don’t fully know.” His jaw tightened, old grief resurfacing with a rawness that told me this wound had never properly healed, buried instead beneath everything else he’d learned to carry silently. “There was a fire in the guest cottage w

Vanessa chose a small café near the hospital, neutral ground, and when we arrived she was already seated in the corner booth, looking smaller than I’d ever seen her, exhaustion and new motherhood stripping away every trace of the sharp, calculated woman who’d cornered me at Grace’s studio months ago.“Thank you for coming,” she said, her voice hollow in a way that made something in my chest twist unexpectedly toward pity.“We spoke to your mother,” Damian said, sliding into the booth across from her, no preamble, no softness in his approach. “We know about the fire. About your father.”Something crumpled in Vanessa’s expression, and for a moment I thought she might simply shatter right there at the table. “She told you.”“She did.” I sat beside Damian, watching Vanessa’s hands tremble around a coffee cup she hadn’t touched. “Vanessa, I’m sorry. About your father. About everything you didn’t know you were carrying.”“Don’t.” Her voice cracked, sharp and defensive despite the exhaustion

Charlotte’s hands shook as Noah fitted the small recording device beneath the collar of her blazer, the tremor visible even from across the hotel room where Damian and I waited with Samuel stationed by the door.“You don’t have to do this,” I said, watching her check her reflection one final time in the mirror. “There are other ways to gather evidence.”“None as clean as this.” Charlotte’s voice had steadied since yesterday’s confession, something resolute settling into her expression that hadn’t been there before. “Marcus trusts me. He won’t suspect anything if I’m the one who walks in there instead of a stranger with a wire.”“If anything feels wrong,” Damian said, “you leave. Immediately. No hesitation, no trying to salvage the recording. Your safety matters more than the evidence.”Charlotte nodded, something grateful flickering behind the fear still evident in her posture. “Thank you. For trusting me with this, even after everything.”She left the room at exactly one fifty-five,