Home / Romance / Vows of vengeance: His contract wife / Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

All Chapters of Vows of vengeance: His contract wife : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

92 Chapters

Redefining the Contract

RhoswenNeither of us had slept more than an hour. I'd come downstairs to find Torin already at the counter, tie absent, shirt from yesterday still on, a man who'd clearly given up on the idea of sleep sometime before dawn and simply kept working instead.The footage was useless in the end. Grainy, distant, a petrol station camera that caught a woman's shape beside Graham's for less than four seconds before she turned away from the lens like she'd known exactly where it was mounted. Dark coat, pale hair pulled back, nothing a court or a search engine could do anything with. Torin watched it eleven times before he finally set the tablet down on the kitchen counter and rubbed both hands over his face."She knew the angle," he said. "That's not luck. That's someone who's done this before."I didn't answer right away. I was still catching up to the morning Graham was gone, the ankle monitor cut clean in the grass, a stranger's shoulder in a four-second clip that told us everything and not

Last Updated : 2026-10-08

A Threat Delivered

RhoswenMy phone had buzzed twice before I'd even finished my coffee that morning, both times Torin, both times some variation of the same question: are you sure about this lunch, are you sure you want all three of them in one room. I'd said yes both times. I was less sure by the second yes than I'd been by the first, but some stubborn part of me had stopped wanting to wait for certainty before acting on anything.The enhanced image turned out to be nothing. A smear of pixels Mateo's team had sharpened into a face-shaped blur that could have belonged to half the pale, dark-coated women in Madrid. Torin stared at it a long time anyway, the way you stare at a word you almost recognize in a language you used to speak, before he finally closed the file and told the team to keep working.I didn't have the luxury of staring at blurred faces all afternoon. I had lunch with Beatrix and Delphine to get through, the first time the three of us had ever been in a room together without Graham's sh

Last Updated : 2026-10-10

Torin's Protection

TorinI'd spent the morning telling myself the quiet, after Graham's disappearance, was a good sign that silence meant regrouping, maybe even retreat. I should have known better. Silence from a man like Graham had never once meant retreat in all the months I'd been studying him. It meant he was choosing his next move carefully, and careful men don't stay quiet for nothing.Mateo called before Rhoswen did, which told me everything about how fast the situation had actually moved before anyone thought to loop me in. I was in a board meeting, half-listening to a discussion of quarterly projections I didn't care about, when my phone lit up with his name and I stepped out without apologizing to the room."She's safe," he said first, which is the only sentence that matters at the start of a call like that, and the only one I actually heard clearly before the rest of what he said. "A note on the windshield. A photo of the three of them at lunch, her face circled, a warning to stop digging. I'

Last Updated : 2026-10-10

Meeting Her Source

RhoswenBeatrix's name turned out to be a dead end, or close enough to one that it didn't change anything that mattered that night. A colleague from the old clinic, nothing more sinister than a woman her mother had worked alongside for a decade, scrawled in a margin for reasons Beatrix herself couldn't fully reconstruct. We sat with it for twenty minutes at one in the morning, turning it over, before Torin finally said what none of us wanted to say first, that not every thread in this story was going to lead somewhere. Some of them were just thread, frayed and going nowhere, the ordinary debris of three decades of secrets.Delphine had texted before I fell asleep, a single line thank you for today, for believing us in the same room and I'd fallen asleep with my phone still in my hand, something in that small sentence settling a part of me that had been unsettled for weeks.I went to bed disappointed and woke up with a message that mattered more.It came through the burner account Priy

Last Updated : 2026-10-11

The First "I Trust You"

RhoswenNobody had eaten properly since the phone call in the garden. Someone had ordered food at some point and it sat untouched on the sideboard, going cold, a small domestic casualty of a day that had stopped making room for ordinary things like appetite.The lawyers worked until nearly ten that night, picking apart the injunction clause by clause in Torin's dining room, papers spread across a table that had never once, in four months, been used for an actual meal. Beatrix sat through most of it pale and silent, hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had gone white, and I understood, watching her, that she'd spent her entire adult life trying not to be noticed by exactly this kind of attention, and now here it was anyway, arriving decades late and twice as cruel."It won't hold," the lead lawyer said finally, closing her folder with more confidence than her face actually carried. "The judge is compromised, we'll get that proven within the week, and the emergency freez

Last Updated : 2026-10-11

Public Affection, Private Fear

RhoswenBeatrix hadn't said a word since Mateo handed her the tablet with the affidavit open on the screen. She just stared at the signature line, Delphine's looping, familiar handwriting under a paragraph of legal language designed to sound harmless, and I watched something close behind her eyes that had only just started opening over the past week.Delphine cried for twenty minutes straight once we got her on the phone, the kind of crying that comes apart in pieces instead of a single clean wave, and by the end of it I believed her more than I believed the document with her name on it."They told me it was a formality," she kept saying, over and over, like the word itself might undo what she'd signed. "A lawyer came to my flat, Rhoswen, weeks ago, before any of this, before lunch, before I even knew Beatrix's name. He said it was paperwork connected to the estate routine, he said, and I signed because Graham's people have always told me to sign things and I've never once questioned

Last Updated : 2026-10-12

Graham Grows Suspicious

GrahamI have spent four months underestimating my goddaughter, and I understand now, sitting in a borrowed apartment that smells of someone else's cigarettes, that underestimating has very nearly cost me everything.The retraction came through yesterday, filed by Delphine's own lawyer, swift and clean and entirely unlike the frightened girl I'd spent years training to sign whatever I placed in front of her without reading past the first paragraph. Someone had coached her. Someone had sat with her, patiently, and taught her that paper could be questioned rather than merely obeyed, and I knew, reading the filing, precisely whose patience that was.I had not expected Rhoswen to build alliances. That was my error, I think, the central one, the one I will spend whatever time remains to me regretting. I assumed, because I had always kept the women in my orbit carefully separated Delphine never permitted to know Beatrix's name, Beatrix never permitted to understand her own mother's history,

Last Updated : 2026-10-12

The DNA Results

RhoswenThe lab called at nine in the morning and asked me to come in person, which I'd requested weeks ago and had somehow forgotten I'd requested, because by the seventh day I'd stopped believing the results would ever actually arrive.I didn't tell Torin. I dressed while he was still in the shower, left a note that said errands, and took Mateo without explaining where we were going, watching Madrid go by through the window with a strange, hollow calm that felt less like peace and more like the moment before a wave breaks, when the water pulls back from the shore and everything goes still and wrong.The technician who'd taken my sample weeks ago wasn't the one who called me into the small side room this time. This one was older, kinder in a practiced, professional way, and she had a folder in front of her that she didn't open right away, which told me more than anything she was about to say."Mrs. Blackwood." She folded her hands over the folder. "Before I go through this with you,

Last Updated : 2026-10-13

Delphine's Truth

RhoswenI watched him cross that courtyard and thought, absurdly, of the first time I'd seen him at the rooftop mixer, composed and unreadable in a way I'd found almost insulting at the time, a man who'd clearly never had to scramble for anything in his life. There was nothing of that man in front of me now.Torin arrived before Mateo had even got me back to the car, striding across the courtyard with his tie loose and his face doing something I'd never seen it do: not composed, not careful, just raw, stripped down to something that looked almost like fear."I need you to hear me out before you say anything," he said, crouching in front of the bench where I sat, close enough that I could see he hadn't shaved that morning, a detail so small and so human it nearly broke whatever composure I had left. "Please. Give me that much."I'd imagined this moment a hundred different ways over the years, some version of Torin confessing a secret, and none of my imaginings had prepared me for how s

Last Updated : 2026-10-14

A Night at the Finca

RhoswenThe second car had trailed us the whole way down, close enough to reassure us, far enough to let the illusion of just the two of us hold for most of the drive. I'd stopped resenting the arrangement somewhere around the third week. Some compromises, it turned out, were just good sense wearing the shape of a concession.Torin suggested the finca the way he suggested most things lately, carefully, watching my face for the flinch that didn't always come anymore but still sometimes did. "My grandfather's land," he said, over breakfast, two days after the photograph with his mother's name attached to a threat neither of us had fully unpacked yet. "Near Ronda. Nobody's used it properly in years. I thought we could both use somewhere that isn't this house, just for a night, before the next thing finds us.""Is it connected to any of it? Your mother, the estate, any of it?""I don't know anymore what isn't connected to it." He said it plainly, without flinching from the admission the w

Last Updated : 2026-10-15

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