All Chapters of Rise Of The Hidden Heiress: From Asylum To Billionaire CEO : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"I object!"The words tore out of me before the officiant could finish his sentence, before five hundred guests could draw their next breath, before the doors behind me had even finished swinging open.I didn't wait for the shock to settle. I walked straight down the aisle while it was still ringing in the air, my heels striking marble hard enough to announce every step, my crimson gown catching candlelight like something that had crawled out of a fire and refused to burn. Every stride cut through five hundred years of manners nobody in this room had ever needed until now.Five hundred heads turned at once. I felt every eye land on me like a heat wave, and I let it. Candle smoke and white orchids filled my lungs, sweeter than anything I'd smelled in fifteen years, and underneath it, the sharp bite of old money that clung to every fabric in the room. This was the moment I'd rehearsed behind locked doors and white walls, the one that had kept me upright through every doctor who wrote my

Emily's Pov Silence held the car for exactly three seconds after I said the words.My family.Then Adrian's phone lit up on the seat between us. One notification. Then another. Then the screen filled faster than either of us could read it, and up front, a second phone started buzzing too, then a third, until the whole car hummed with it like something alive.I pulled mine from my clutch out of habit more than curiosity.Breaking news banners had already replaced whatever three networks had been airing an hour ago. A shaky cathedral video played on a loop under a red ticker, my hand connecting with Claire's cheek frozen mid-swing as the thumbnail. Someone had captioned it before I'd even sat down in this car.THE DEAD HEIRESS RETURNS.KINGSLEY WEDDING ENDS IN CHAOS.WHO IS EMILY GRANT?Comments stacked under the videos faster than the counter could keep up, strangers arguing over a name they'd known for ninety seconds as they'd always had an opinion on it. My face, blurry and lit gold

Emily's Pov I woke before the sky did, the way I always had in the years when waking up on time meant the difference between eating and not, a habit fifteen years in a house full of other people's money had never managed to soften out of me.Adrian was still asleep on the sofa, one arm thrown over his eyes, the pillow he'd declared war on the night before finally back beneath his head like it had surrendered sometime after midnight, a truce nobody had bothered to announce. I let myself look at him for exactly one second longer than I needed to, studying the line of his jaw in the gray half-light, the stillness that never quite left him even asleep. Handsome, in the specific way men who'd never had to earn anything sometimes were. Still not my problem.I dressed quietly in the dark and left before the house woke up around me, before the staff could ask questions I wasn't ready to answer and before Adrian could ask the one question I definitely wasn't ready for.My phone buzzed before

Adrian’s PovI woke before the household did, out of habit more than intention, and reached across the sofa cushions before I'd fully opened my eyes. Empty. Her side of the room, or whatever the sofa counted as a side, held nothing but a folded blanket and the pillow she'd once declared war on, still sitting exactly where she'd left it the night before.No note. No message. No explanation waiting on my phone. I checked twice, in case I'd missed something in the half light, some small courtesy she might have left behind out of habit rather than intention. There was nothing at all.I wasn't surprised. Emily had made it clear from the first morning that she didn't intend to account for her whereabouts to anyone, least of all to me. What bothered me was how cleanly she'd managed it, slipping out of a house full of staff, cameras, and a security team paid handsomely to notice exactly this kind of thing, without a single person seeing which door she'd used.I checked the time. She'd already

Adrian's PovMason kept the car moving fast through streets that grew emptier with every block, and I kept my eyes on the information scrolling across his phone, mounted now on the dash between us. I didn't know what Emily had gotten herself into.That uncertainty sat heavier than I wanted to admit, a weight I had no intention of naming out loud, not even to myself, not with Mason sitting close enough to notice."Anything?" I asked."Still tracking. She's not moving fast. The SUV's holding position behind her, matching her speed almost exactly." Mason's eyes flicked to the mirror out of habit, though there was nothing behind us but empty road. "We're maybe four minutes out."Four minutes felt considerably longer than they should have.The city thinned as we drove onward, glass towers giving way to warehouses and cracked pavement, the noise of Silvercrest fading into something closer to silence with every block we crossed, storefronts giving way to shuttered loading docks and rust-stre