All Chapters of The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

ElianaI went to Kensington Gardens at noon with fifty thousand pounds in my handbag and murder in my heart, and I found only an empty bench, a pigeon, and a black car whose rear door opened the moment I approached.A chauffeur in a grey livery stepped out and informed me, in the soft voice of someone reading from a card, that the lady I was meeting preferred not to conduct business in a public park. I almost turned and walked away, because my mother had taught me never to enter a stranger's vehicle, but I had also been taught that fear is simply information you have not yet learned how to use. The photograph of my joyful face in Dr. Marlow's parking lot was burning a hole in my phone, and whoever had taken it already owned me more thoroughly than any car door could.The drive lasted twenty minutes and ended at a discreet townhouse in Mayfair with a brass plate that read The Aurelian Rooms, Members Only. A girl in a cream tunic took my coat, pressed a glass of c

IsabellaThe message arrived at 12:47 in the morning, when the penthouse had settled into the particular hush of a building where everyone was pretending to sleep.I was sitting on the window seat of our bedroom with a blanket over my knees and a cup of ginger tea going cold in my hands, watching the lights of London drift in the rain. Travis had been called into his study an hour earlier by Hale, and I could hear the low rumble of their voices beneath the door like thunder moving across distant hills. The cream envelope from the ballroom lay on the cushion beside me, torn open and empty, because the paper inside it had contained only a printed line that I had already burned in the sink.The line had read, The guard with the scar is not yours.My phone buzzed against the glass, and the screen lit with an unknown number. I almost let it ring out, but something in me had grown tired of flinching, so I opened the message and read it.Ask him about the Geneva vault. Ask why it had to be y

IsabellaTravis left for Zurich before dawn with Hale beside him and a promise to return by midnight, and he kissed my forehead at the door with the hesitant tenderness of a man who was afraid of being refused.I stood in the marble foyer after the lift doors had closed behind him, holding the folded letter from his mother against my chest. He had answered my question the previous morning with a single sentence that I had turned over a hundred times since then, saying that he did not know whether she was alive and that not knowing had been eating him from the inside for three weeks. It was an honest answer, and it was also a terrible one, because it meant that the man I was married to had spent his whole life grieving a woman who might still be breathing somewhere beyond his reach.The morning tray arrived at nine, carried by Rosa, who set it on the dressing table with the careful quiet of a woman afraid of waking something. I had grown used to the ginger tea an

KarinaThe jet's door opened onto a grey London morning, and I paused at the top of the stairs for long enough to let the wind find the hem of my scarlet coat.Five years had passed since the night I was supposed to burn, and in that time I had learned that nothing unsettles an audience like a woman who walks out of a fire and straightens her sleeves. I wore red from throat to ankle, a column of silk that clung to the long lines of my body, and I had chosen every thread of it with the same care that a general chooses a battlefield. Beneath the left glove, where the leather hid the shiny ridges of old scarring, my skin still remembered the heat.The airfield smelled of kerosene and wet tarmac, and a black Mercedes waited at the foot of the steps with its engine murmuring. A young man in a dark suit held the rear door open, and I descended with the unhurried grace of a woman who had never once been late for her own entrance. He was Julien, my handler's nephew and

IsabellaI stepped out of the lift on the ground floor with a folder of orphanage invoices under my arm, and I walked straight into a silence so thick that I could feel it pressing against my skin.I had spent the morning in the foundation offices on the fourteenth floor, burying myself in spreadsheets because I could not bear to sit in the penthouse with the memory of a locked door and a painted woman's smile. The pulse in my wrist had still been throbbing from the place where Travis had gripped me, and I had told myself that columns of numbers would calm it. Then Hale's assistant had called the department with a trembling voice and asked all staff to remain at their desks, and curiosity had carried me to the lobby against every instruction.The receptionists stood motionless behind their marble counter, and a cluster of junior analysts hovered near the pillars with their phones raised like candles at a vigil. Beneath the great bronze falcon, Travis knelt on th