All Chapters of The Billionaire's Secret Bride: Chapter 431 - Chapter 440

Point of View: Alexander“Mrs. Sterling, we adore you, but my husband says we cannot put our daughter’s name on a school that is being sued. Please understand. We are only afraid. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side.”The voice came from the kitchen speaker at seven the next morning, bright with false kindness. I stood in the doorway with a cup of coffee going cold in my hand. Elena sat at the table in yesterday’s clothes. She had not gone to bed. A pile of printed emails lay beside her plate, each one the same polite knife.“I understand,” Elena said. Her voice was perfectly even. “Thank you for telling me yourself.”“We hope this does not change anything between us.”“Of course not.”She ended the call. Then she laid her phone face down very carefully, as if it might break, and put both hands flat on the table.“That is the ninth family,” she said.“Elena.”“Nine families in sixteen hours. The Delancey waiting list has two hundred children on it. I built that list myself. I wrote t

Point of View: Alexander“You want to take that paper to a dying man, Alexander. A man who fell down in front of us yesterday. Tell me how that is justice, and not simply revenge wearing a good coat.”Elena stood in the doorway of our bedroom at midnight, with her arms crossed over her nightgown and a shawl around her shoulders. The lamp threw her shadow long across the carpet. I sat on the edge of the bed with the folded fire report in my hands, still in my shirt and trousers, unable to remember when I had last eaten.“It is not revenge,” I said.“Then what?”“I want to ask him why.”“Ask him tomorrow. Ask him when Dr. Osei says he can bear it.”“He may not have a tomorrow.”“Then ask him gently, and let him choose the day.” Her voice shook. “Do you hear yourself? You said the same thing to me last night. You said do not decide what I can carry. Now you want to decide what he can.”I flinched. It was a clean hit, and she knew it. She came and sat beside me, close enough that her shou

Point of View: Alexander“Young man, I am told you have your grandmother’s temper. Sit down before you scare my pie. I did not bake it for a man who stands over me like a judge.”Marta Hart sat in the plastic visitor’s chair beside my father’s bed, with a covered dish on her knees and her handbag clamped under her arm. She was small, and straight as a rod, and she looked at me with Elena’s dark eyes and none of Elena’s patience. I sat at once.The room smelled of warm butter and pears. It was Thursday night, and the hospital hummed around us with the soft business of a place that never sleeps. Elena stood by the window, her hands clasped so tightly I could see the knuckles. Marcus leaned in the doorway. Nobody spoke.My father lay propped on three pillows, pale as paper, his eyes open and fixed on the dish.“Is that pear?” he whispered.“Pear,” Marta said.“It smells like…” His voice cracked. “It smells like a back step.”“It is her recipe. Lydia’s. I did not change a thing.” Marta’s

Point of View: Alexander“Your brother phoned me on Tuesday night, Mr. Sterling. He said the Sterlings would pay any price to keep the fire quiet. Ask him what he offered. Ask him why he sounded so eager.”Julian Thorne said it with a gentle smile, at the head of a glass table on the fortieth floor of Calloway Reed Advisory. It was two o’clock on Friday afternoon. Rain streaked the windows, and the whole gray city lay beneath us like a spilled chessboard. Six lawyers sat along the table in dark suits. Vanessa sat at my right hand, very straight, with a pen she had not yet picked up.Marcus sat on my left. He did not move.I felt Elena’s warning from that morning crawl across my skin. The tip. The name at the bottom. Marcus is the one who will bring the proof. I had turned it over all through the long drive. I had not asked him one question, as I had promised my father. I had only looked at the side of his face while he drove, and seen a muscle jump in his jaw.“Marcus,” I said quietly

Point of View: Alexander“I did not tell you because I wanted you to keep looking at him the way you always have. Do you know what I would give to have your eyes, Alex? Just for one day?”Marcus said it on the dark stage of the Delancey Theater, at eleven fifty, with a single work light burning on its metal stand and the empty seats rising behind us like a silent congregation. I sat on the edge of the boards with my legs hanging over the orchestra pit. He stood in the circle of light, soaked to the skin, a thin gray folder pressed to his chest.The theater smelled of dust and cold velvet and the faint ghost of old perfume. A pipe ticked somewhere in the wall.“Midnight,” I said. “Father said midnight.”“He did.”“So tell me.”He did not move. His hands trembled on the folder. I had never seen anyone look so frightened of one small room of the truth.He sat. Close, but not touching. The light made his face look carved out of paper.“It was nine years ago,” he began. “I was twenty four.