บททั้งหมดของ My Ex Called Me Fat, Now His Father-in-Law Wants Me: บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

Chapter 62: Some Man With Children POV: Odette My mother reached me before the security detail did. Her hand closed around my upper arm, not gentle, fingers digging in through my sleeve. The scent of her perfume hit me a second later, powdery and cold, the same one she'd worn to every pack function of my childhood. She pulled me toward her with the exact motion I remembered from being a teenager who'd worn the wrong thing. "Don't fight me," she said, low, close to my ear. "Not here." I wasn't fighting her. I was still trying to remember how my legs worked. The cameras had closed in fast, a loose half-circle forming at a respectful distance that wasn't really respected. Just the practiced spacing of people who knew exactly how far back to stand to still get the shot. Shutters clicked in a soft, dry patter, and somewhere a microphone boom cast a long shadow across the pavement at my feet. Behind me, a boy from my ethics seminar was filming on his phone. I recognized his backpack b

Chapter 64: Reassessment POV: Beckett I had the TV on for background noise, not actually watching it, waiting on Clara to finish getting ready so we could hit the restaurant she'd been talking about all week. Some place with a two-month waitlist, the kind Clara loved because it meant she got to watch other people not get in. The remote sat on the arm of the couch. My drink sat in my hand. "You almost ready?" I called toward the bedroom. "Almost." I flipped through channels out of habit and landed on a local news break, some reporter standing outside a college quad with a mic, cameras flashing behind her hard enough to wash out half the shot. I almost changed it. Then I caught the name. "...confirming that Odette Sinclair, previously unknown to the public, is in fact the sole heir to the Sinclair pack fortune, one of the largest privately held wolf estates on the East Coast..." My glass hit the floor before I registered I'd let go of it. "Clara." My voice came out wrong, too l

Chapter 66: Conditional POV: Odette It wasn't Julian. It was a courier, some nervous kid in a delivery uniform holding a leather portfolio he clearly didn't want to be holding. A member of staff hustled him back out the door within thirty seconds, and I got no more than a glimpse of his pale, sweating face. My father took the portfolio without a word of thanks and set it, unopened, on the side table like it could wait. I felt my pulse slow back down, and hated that it had spiked at all. The sitting room had gone quiet again. The fire ticked in the grate, and the air smelled of lemon polish and old wood and the lilies my mother always kept on the piano, sweet enough to catch at the back of my throat. "You knew where I was," I said, once the door had shut again. "This whole time." My father didn't even have the decency to look uncomfortable about it. "Of course we knew. Did you think Sinclair security couldn't locate one runaway daughter living under her own first name?" Five y

Chapter 68: No Version Where I Say No POV: Odette The sound of it rang louder in my ears than the actual pain, one flat crack that bounced off the marble and the high ceiling and came back at me twice. The pain arrived a half-second later, blooming hot and sharp across my cheekbone, my whole face throbbing in time with my own pulse. I put a hand up to my face on instinct. Not to check for blood, just to hold the ache in place. My skin was already hot under my palm, and I could taste something metallic where my teeth had caught the inside of my cheek. I stared at my father like I'd never actually seen him before. Not properly. Not in all the years I'd lived under his roof believing there was some line he wouldn't cross. There wasn't. There never had been. I'd just never pushed hard enough to find it. "Sit down," he said, like nothing had happened, like his hand hadn't just cracked across my face in a room with gold-framed portraits watching from every wall. The fire snapped in th

Chapter 70: Recalculating POV: Nikolai I told myself I was monitoring the situation for practical reasons. The Sinclair announcement had implications for half a dozen deals currently sitting on my desk. Alliances shifted the moment a fortune that size reentered public visibility. Territory arrangements would need reassessing now that the Sinclair heir had a face and a location attached to her again. It was reasonable, defensible, entirely within the scope of my responsibilities as an Alpha with holdings across three states, to spend an hour reading everything the internet had already produced about Odette Sinclair in the six hours since her father's announcement. That justification lasted exactly as long as it took me to open the third article. The study had gone dim around me. Only the desk lamp was lit, a warm circle of light on the blotter, and the tablet's glow washed cold and blue across my hands. The scotch at my elbow had stopped sweating hours ago. The photographs had mu