All Chapters of REBIRTH: THE BILLIONAIRE'S DEAD WIFE : Chapter 21 - Chapter 28

The station gave them a room with a single table and bare walls. An officer carried in a second box, set it down between them, and left without saying anything. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving the room quiet except for the faint noise of people moving somewhere farther down the hall.Ava pulled the top folder from the box and opened it. The date stamped in the corner made her stop.For a moment she thought she was reading it wrong. She looked again. The date hadn't changed."This can't be right."Adrian leaned closer to see what she was looking at. She felt him go still beside her.The file was dated three years before they had met. Three years before she'd ever heard his name.Ava looked up. "You knew about me?"Adrian didn't answer immediately. His eyes stayed on the page. "I knew someone was watching you.""That's not what I asked."His gaze lifted to hers. "No."The answer sat between them.Ava looked back at the file. "You knew.""I knew there was a file.""And you neve

Ava stared at the photograph until the edges of it blurred, her own teenage face grinning back at her from a memory she didn't have."I don't know him," she said. "I don't remember this. I don't remember any of this.""But you're standing right next to him," Adrian said quietly."I know what I'm looking at."Her thumb brushed the edge of the print, and that was when she noticed it. The angle was wrong. The shadows falling the way they did when someone shot from a distance with a long lens instead of standing close enough to be in the frame themselves."He didn't take this," she said slowly.Adrian leaned in over her shoulder, his breath caught. "No. Look at the angle. Whoever took this was across the garden. Hidden.""Someone was watching us. Both of us."The old man's hands shook as he reached for the photograph again, turning it over, squinting at something stamped faint on the back corner. If his face had already gone pale once tonight, it went paler now."This stamp," he rasped. "

The security firm had dissolved years ago, folded into a shell company and then into nothing at all, according to every public record Ava could find. But the network hadn't dissolved with it. She found the access point just before dawn, buried behind three layers of old routing that nobody had bothered to shut down properly."This shouldn't still be live," Adrian said, leaning over her shoulder in the glow of the screen."It's not just live." Ava scrolled faster, her pulse climbing. "It's active."New entries filled the log, dated within the last month. Her current address. A coffee shop she'd visited twice. A dinner with Lila three weeks ago, timestamped to the minute."They never stopped," Adrian said quietly.She didn't answer. Her mind was already somewhere else, chasing a thought she wasn't ready to say out loud yet.Ava scrolled further back, past the recent entries, into older records nobody had touched in years. An address surfaced, a house she recognized from childhood summer

The alarm continued blaring as Adrian caught Ava's hand and pulled her away from the wrecked shelves. Somewhere beyond the debris, footsteps moved through the darkness, close enough that she stopped and listened, trying to work out whether whoever had broken in was coming toward them or heading for another exit. "Stay behind me," Adrian said. "No. I'm not leaving you to deal with this alone." He glanced at her but didn't argue. They moved down the corridor together, keeping close to the walls as they passed the overturned furniture and broken glass. At the far end, light spilled beneath a door, and Adrian headed straight for it, his grip tightening around Ava's hand when something clattered in the room behind them. The security station was empty, its monitors dark except for one displaying a login screen. Adrian released Ava's hand long enough to move to the desk, where he began checking the system. "They've logged out," he said after a moment. "Two minutes ago." "Did they get