All Chapters of The Billionaire's Secret Bride: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Point of View: Alexander"Someone was watching us." Elena's voice was breathless on the phone, and for one terrible second every plan I had rehearsed for the boardroom disappeared completely.I got Elena's call while I was still knotting my tie in front of a mirror I wasn't really seeing, and the panic in her voice undid every ounce of composure I had built up for the boardroom in the last twelve hours."Someone was watching us," she said, breathless, the sound of her car engine roaring underneath her words. "Vanessa saw a car idling at the end of the block, and when she looked again it was already gone. Alexander, she thinks Priya might be Eleanor's daughter."The words hit me like a fist to the sternum, forcing every plan I had rehearsed for the board meeting to scatter apart at once. I stared at my own reflection for a moment, tie half finished, and barely recognized the man staring back at me, someone who twelve hours ago had been rehearsing calm, measured answers for a board meet

Point of View: Alexander"The surveillance van outside Elena's apartment wasn't registered to Marcus."Marcus had never once in his life walked away from a fight he thought he could still win, and watching him leave that boardroom without a single parting threat told me something was very wrong long before Daniel confirmed it an hour later.The hallway outside my office was unusually quiet for the middle of the afternoon, most of my staff still buzzing somewhere downstairs about the emergency session that had ended so abruptly, and I found myself grateful for the silence even as my mind refused to slow down enough to actually enjoy it. My reflection caught in the glass wall as I passed, and for a moment I barely recognized the exhaustion carved into my own face, a man who had not properly slept in almost two days and looked every bit of it.I found Daniel in my office, three laptops open across my desk, his face lit blue in the afternoon light streaming through the windows behind him.

Point of View: Elena"If you're reading this, then I finally found her." The ink blurred under my thumb as I read the line again, and for one terrible second I understood that whatever my father had discovered had frightened him more than his own failing heart ever could. I read it a third time, tracing the shape of his handwriting, the way the letters slanted more sharply than I remembered from birthday cards and grocery lists, as if he'd written it in a hurry, or with a hand that had already begun to shake.Alexander was already reaching for his keys before I finished reading the sentence out loud. "The hospital," he said. "Now." I didn't argue. I grabbed my coat and followed him out the door, my mother's folder still spread across my kitchen floor behind us, forgotten for the first time in days, its photographs and yellowed clippings left scattered like something we might never return to pick up.The drive took eleven minutes that felt like an hour. Rain had started somewhere along

Point of View: Elena"Ask her what she inherited." Alexander read the message out loud twice, like saying it a second time might change what it meant, and I watched Priya's face go from confusion to something close to terror in the space of a single breath, her whole body seeming to fold inward around the words."Inherited from who," Priya asked, her voice small in a way I had never heard from her before, not even that morning in the bakery when everything had first come apart, when flour still dusted the counters and none of us had known yet how far this was going to reach. "Elena, I don't understand what any of this means.""Neither do I," I said, sitting beside her, though a cold, creeping suspicion had already started forming somewhere at the back of my mind, one I wasn't ready to say out loud yet because saying it might make it true, because some truths only become real the moment you give them language.Alexander crouched in front of us both, his phone still open to that message

Point of View: Elena"There's a room in this house your grandfather never let anyone see, not even me." Alexander's grandmother's oldest housekeeper said it with her hands trembling around a ring of keys older than either of us, and something about the way she wouldn't meet my eyes made the back of my neck prickle with cold, a chill that had nothing to do with the drafty stone hallway we stood in.Alexander had called ahead, and Mrs. Whitfield had been waiting for us at the Sterling family estate an hour outside the city, a woman well into her eighties who had served three generations of this family and clearly knew far more than she'd ever been permitted to say, her whole bearing that of someone who had spent a lifetime guarding a door she never once opened. "Eleanor asked me once," she said, leading us down a narrow staircase behind the library, the stone steps worn smooth in the center by decades of footsteps, "to promise her something would only be opened if the family truly neede