The Bride They Tried to Erase のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

Diana's POVI didn't run. I'd told myself I might, standing in that hallway with the image of Adrian's calm cruelty still fresh behind my eyes, but the weeks that followed proved otherwise. I stayed, and the estate slowly folded that night into something I filed away rather than confronted directly.Months passed that way, quiet on the surface, though I noticed things now I hadn't before — the tension that occasionally crossed Adrian's face after certain phone calls, the way his men sometimes disappeared for days and returned looking older than when they'd left. I understood, more fully than I had that first night, exactly what kind of house I was living in."Diana."I looked up from my coffee to find him sliding into the seat across from me, entirely uninvited, that same easy smile in place."You have a habit of appearing exactly when I'm alone," I said."I have a habit of paying attention," he corrected. "It's a useful skill in my line of work."He signaled the waiter without asking

Adrian's POVThe call came in the middle of the night, the kind that never brought good news at that hour."Sir," one of my men said, his voice tight in a way I'd learned to take seriously immediately. "The Ferraro shipment. It's gone. Warehouse three, cleaned out completely, and two of our guards aren't answering."I was already pulling on a jacket before he finished the sentence. "Cameras," I said."Disabled an hour before it happened. Whoever did this knew our rotation schedule. Knew exactly which warehouse, exactly which night."That wasn't luck. That was information, the kind that only came from inside knowledge, someone with access to schedules that weren't supposed to leave this house.The drive there felt longer than it should have, every red light another delay I didn't have patience for, my mind already running through contingencies before I'd even seen the damage for myself.I arrived at the warehouse to find it exactly as reported — empty shelving where a fortune in produc

Adrian's POVI put two of my most trusted men on the investigation personally, men who'd worked for me long enough that I didn't have to explain what discretion meant."Trace everything, I told them." "The camera feeds, the guard rotations, anyone who had access to that schedule in the weeks before the hit." "I want a full list by tomorrow."They worked through the night, and I spent most of it in my study, going over the warehouse footage myself frame by frame, looking for anything my men might have missed in their first pass. There was nothing useful in it. Whoever had done this had known exactly where every camera sat, exactly how long the blind spots lasted between rotations, exactly which guard would be posted where at what hour. It wasn't the work of an outsider. It was the work of someone who'd studied my organization the way I'd studied it myself, patiently, over years, until the whole structure was memorized.The list came back the next evening, longer than I wanted it to be,

Adrian's POVSomething was really going on, and I needed to investigate properly instead of running on instinct alone.Later that day, I asked Diana for her tablet before she went out, telling her only that I needed to run a routine check on the house's network security, nothing that would worry her further than she already had reason to be. She handed it over without hesitation, which somehow made me feel worse about the whole thing rather than better.I gave it straight to my tech specialist, a man I trusted with exactly this kind of quiet, careful work. He spent hours with it, turning it over in his hands, taking it apart and putting it back together, running diagnostics I only half understood the names of. I paced my study more than once while I waited, refusing to settle into anything else until he had an answer for me.When he finally came to find me, his expression told me before he said a word that whatever he'd found wasn't going to be simple."The tablet's clean," he said. "

Diana's POVI reached the kitchen. If I was going to spend the day pretending the house didn't feel like it was closing in on me, I was going to do it with a full stomach. Noodles. Something spicy enough to burn the thoughts right out of my head for a while.I pulled out everything I needed and got to work — cutting the peppers thin, cracking an egg into the pan to fry until the edges went crisp and lacy, and then, because I apparently had zero self-control when it came to spice, tipping in far more chili than any reasonable person would. I loved my noodles spicy. Dangerously spicy. The kind that made your eyes water and your nose run and somehow still tasted like the best thing you'd ever eaten.The smell of it filled the kitchen, curling up into my nose and settling low in my stomach, which growled right on cue like it had been waiting all morning for permission. By the time I plated the noodles in a bowl and slid the fried egg on top, yolk still soft and glistening, I was practical