All Chapters of His Contract Wife's Secret Twins : Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

Zahara's POVThe knock came at midnight…three sharp knocks that shook something loose in my chest before I even opened the door.I did not move right away. I just stood in the hallway of my small apartment, my hand hovering near the light switch...listening to my daughter Cherry's soft breathing; through the cracked door of the twins' room.Edward, her brother, mumbled something in his sleep and turned over...The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen behind me. It had been the only steady sound in my apartment that had never once in five years been visited by anyone from my old life.It had been five years of silence from my father. And now...a fist is landing against my door in the middle of the night.I opened it to find a man I did not know. Gray suit. Gloved hands...and a leather folder pressed to his chest like it held something sacred."Miss Lawson," he called me, and my own name in his mouth felt like a slap. Nobody had called me Lawson in five years.Here, in this life I had buil

Zahara's POVFor a moment neither of us spoke. My father looked between us, confused by the sudden silence…unaware that the air in the room had turned into something sharp enough to cut."Have you two met?" he asked.Armando's jaw tightened. "Briefly," he said and something about the flat, careful way he said it; told me he intended to keep the rest buried…at least for now. I hold onto that mercy like a drowning woman grabbing driftwood."Small city," I muttered.My father, satisfied with an answer that explained nothing...excused himself to get the contracts, leaving us alone in a room that suddenly felt too small for the two of us...and everything unsaid between us.As the door shut behind him...the silence that followed, felt louder than anything either of us could have said out loud.Armando studied me quietly... the way a man studies an opponent. Searching for a weakness he could use."You disappeared," he said once the latch settled into place. "I went back to that bar for a wee

Armando's POVShe left my study with her spine straight and her chin level, and I stood by the window long after the door clicked shut…watching her reflection dissolve into the glass instead of the woman herself.Certainly, I will. Just three words, she said without a flicker of hesitation.I had expected resistance. Like most women, who married into this kind of arrangement and wanted to negotiate, to soften the edges of a contract until it looked more like a courtship. But she simply agreed. Just the way a person agrees to terms they have no intention of honoring in full.I told myself it did not matter. A wife who followed rules without asking why was easier to manage than one who fought me on every point. But something about her stillness sat wrong in my chest. The same way a locked door sits wrong when you already suspect what waits behind it.I poured a drink I did not want and left it untouched on the desk...the same habit I had carried since the accident that took my parents

Zahara's POV"Zahara, I think he got everything." The words settled into my body like...stones, dropped into still water spreading outward— until every part of me felt the weight of them. I pressed my back harder, against the hallway wall...forcing air into lungs that suddenly refused to cooperate."Where are they now?" I asked— proud of how level my voice came out even as my pulse hammered against my throat."Inside. Safe. I locked every window and I am not letting them near the door until you get here." Priya's breathing was uneven on the other end with the sound of her pacing audible even through the phone. "But Zahara, this man knew what he was looking for. He was not some random photographer chasing a story. He had their names ready before I even opened my mouth."My blood went cold at that. A stranger with a camera was a coincidence but a stranger who already knew Cherry and Edward's names was something else entirely…something deliberate, something that reached directly into th