All Chapters of The Wife They Wanted Dead : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 2 They let me back in faster than I expected. Maybe Marlow said something. Maybe it didn't matter anymore, once a name like Ravaryn got involved. My father was already sitting when they brought me in, and something about the way he looked up — hopeful, like maybe I'd come back with good news — made what I had to say so much worse. "Dad." I sat down across from him and put the card on the table between us, face up, like it was evidence of something. "Valen Ravaryn came to see me." His whole body went still. "He wants me to marry his son. In exchange, he says he'll get you real representation. The best in the state, he said. A real chance." I watched it land on him, watched his face do something I hadn't seen it do the whole time I'd been growing up. Not the lying face. Something worse. Fear that wasn't for himself. "No." He said it flat, immediate, like there was no room in it for discussion. "Absolutely not. Seraphine, no." "Dad, they're going to convict you. Ev

Chapter 4 I never told anyone about the figure across the street. Not my father, who wasn't allowed visitors that close to a wedding. Not Sophia, my best friend who would've shown up at my door with a baseball bat and a hundred questions I didn't have answers to. I just folded it up small and carried it with me into the one day I didn't have room to carry anything extra, and by the time the stylist was pinning my hair back, I'd half convinced myself I'd imagined the whole thing. Half. --- The wedding wasn't a wedding. It was a production. Three hundred chairs. A string quartet that never seemed to stop playing even during the parts where nobody was supposed to be listening to music. Senators. A woman I recognized from the cover of a business magazine standing near the bar with a smile that didn't move past her mouth. Every guest dressed like they were auditioning for something, and me in the middle of it in white, feeling less like a bride and more like something set out o

Chapter 6 I read it four times before I made myself stop. If you want to stay alive, don't fall in love with your husband. Then I folded it back along its own crease, smaller each time, until it fit inside my palm, and I shoved it into the lining of my jewelry box where nobody would think to look unless they already knew what they were looking for. My hands weren't steady doing it. I told myself that was fine. Nobody was watching. I didn't actually believe that. Not anymore. Breakfast again. Same table, same too-bright light coming through windows too tall for any normal house, same three faces arranging themselves into whatever version of pleasant they'd decided on that morning. "Seraphine." Valen looked up from his paper this time, which felt almost worse than when he didn't. "I trust you're settling in." "I am." I wasn't. I sat down and reached for the coffee, mostly to give my hands something to do besides sit in my lap where he could watch them shake. "Good." He f

Chapter 8 I didn't sleep again. The man's face kept surfacing behind my eyes every time I closed them — the flash, the way he'd lowered the phone so calmly, like getting caught wasn't even a real possibility for him. I told Caius. He just said he'd look into it, jaw tight, and then said nothing else, which told me more than an actual answer would have. By the time he left for the city three days later, some business he didn't explain and I didn't ask about, I'd already decided I was done waiting for people in that house to tell me things. The mansion felt different with him gone. Bigger, somehow, and quieter in a way that pressed against my ears. I told myself I was just looking for the library. That was mostly true, for the first ten minutes. Then I found myself in a corridor I didn't recognize, past a turn I was fairly sure I'd never taken, standing in front of a door that didn't match any of the others in that house — heavier, older, with a lock built into it instead of j

Chapter 10 I sat there long after his hand went slack in mine. A nurse came in eventually and told me gently that I should let him rest, that visiting hours had technically ended two hours ago, that I could come back in the morning. I didn't move right away. I just kept turning that name over in my head, the one he'd whispered right before he went under, trying to fit it into anything I already knew about him and finding nowhere for it to land. I didn't ask her what it meant. She wouldn't have known anyway. I wrote it down on my phone before I could forget and told myself I'd find out once he could actually answer me. They kept him four days before a doctor finally signed off on moving him. I sat through every one of those days in a chair that never got comfortable, watching monitors I didn't fully understand, until a man in a white coat told me his vitals had stabilized enough to continue recovery at home under private care. Valen arranged everything — a private transport,