บททั้งหมดของ Rise Of The Hidden Heiress: From Asylum To Billionaire CEO : บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

Emily's Pov The message stayed open on my screen longer than it needed to.Ashbourne Estate. You are looking in the wrong place.I didn't waste much time wondering who'd sent it. They knew the Trust existed. They knew I was searching for it. And they'd handed me a name they wanted me chasing, confident enough to risk showing their hand this early. That last part mattered most. If someone was trying to redirect me, I wanted to know why they cared enough to bother, why an abandoned house I hadn't set foot in since I was nine suddenly warranted a warning.I was already reaching for my coat when Adrian found me in the hallway."Where are you going?"I didn't answer."Emily.""Do what you want. I'm not changing my plans for you." I kept walking, and I heard him fall into step behind me without another word of protest, Mason trailing a beat later with the particular resignation of a man who'd apparently decided that following his boss into questionable situations had become an unofficial p

Emily's Pov I turned toward the study window before the recognition had even finished settling, before I'd let myself name what I'd seen or feel anything about it.The glass showed nothing now. Empty room, empty reflection, whatever had been standing there gone as completely as if I'd imagined it, though I knew better than to believe that. I didn't chase blindly out into the hall after a shape that had already had time to disappear. I studied the window instead: the angle of the reflection against where I'd been standing when the photo was taken, the room's position relative to the door, the distance a person would have needed to cover to vanish that cleanly and that fast without a single sound reaching me.The angle told me something I should have caught immediately.That reflection hadn't come from outside through the glass. It had come from inside the room itself, someone standing close enough behind me to be caught in the window's dark surface while I bent over my mother's desk d

Emily's Pov The hallway light had burned out sometime between when I'd left my room and when I came back to it, and that was the only warning I got, one small detail I should have registered as wrong the moment I noticed it instead of a beat too late. The estate had been quiet all evening, the staff already gone to bed. Adrian was still downstairs with Mason, going over something on his laptop I hadn't bothered to ask about, their voices reduced to low murmurs behind a closed study door.A hand closed around my throat out of the dark before I'd fully registered the shape moving toward me out of nowhere. Not a warning grip at all. Not something meant to intimidate, the kind of grab that left room for negotiation afterward. The kind of hold that meant business from the first second, fingers already tightening, already committed to finishing what they'd started before I'd even had the chance to understand what was happening.This wasn't a scare tactic. Whoever this was had come to kill

Emily's Pov I woke to pain before I woke to anything else, my throat raw where his hand had closed around it, my side burning in a tight, insistent line that pulled with every breath. For a few seconds I didn't know where I was. Then the fragments arrived in order. The dark hallway. The grip. The fight. The knife. His voice, low and almost amused, telling me I should have stopped digging.I'd survived. He hadn't been caught.Thirst won out over the pain faster than I expected. I wasn't waiting for a nurse to remember I existed. I tested my legs, found them steadier than they had any right to be, and made my way down the corridor toward the small hospital shop, choosing an ice cream because it was cold and simple and didn't require anyone's permission or explanation. It wasn't carelessness. It was the only small decision left mine entirely to make that night.The attacker's words followed me the whole way back, worse than the ache in my side. He hadn't asked what I knew. He'd already

Emily's Pov I stepped out of the car.The Blackwood mansion rose ahead of us, all deliberate grandeur, the kind built specifically to remind visitors of their place before they'd said a single word. Family members were already gathered near the entrance, small clusters of conversation that paused just slightly too long as I crossed the courtyard.Claire was crossing toward me before I'd closed the door behind me. She stopped the moment she saw me, and I watched her expression rearrange itself into something practiced, something she'd clearly planned, rehearsed in a mirror somewhere before she'd ever known exactly when I'd arrive.They're a pack of wolves. Adrian's warning sat quiet and useful at the back of my mind, exactly where I'd kept it since the night he'd said it. I'd faced worse than this.She planted herself directly in my path, close enough that I couldn't pretend not to notice her, Adrian's cousin lingering a few steps back with the particular interest of someone who'd bee