Todos os capítulos de MY HUSBAND'S TRAP: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

Morning After the ClaimDawn bled slowly across the city, turning the glass walls of the penthouse the color of weak, liquid gold.Geoffrey woke first.For a long moment he did not move. Vivienne lay half on top of him, one long leg thrown over his hips, her cheek pressed to the center of his chest. Her breath was warm and even against his skin. The sheets were a complete wreck—tangled, shoved halfway off the mattress, heavily stained from the night before. Most of the damage was concentrated on the left side of the bed. Lottie’s side. The side she had slept on for ten quiet, obedient years.The air still smelled of sex, of Vivienne’s perfume, and beneath it the faint, stubborn ghost of the soft floral scent Lottie had once worn. Geoffrey stared at the ceiling and felt nothing but a deep, cold satisfaction.She was right.The bed was theirs now.Vivienne stirred. She stretched like a cat that had finally been allowed to claim the best patch of sunlight, then lifted her head. Her eyes

The memories did not return like a gentle tide.They returned like a building collapsing inward steel screaming, glass exploding, every floor of the last ten years crashing down on her at once. Charlene Jean Rice sat bolt upright in the clinic bed at 3:17 a.m. with a silent scream locked behind her teeth. Her body was drenched in cold sweat. Her hands shook so violently the monitor leads rattled against the rail. The blank spaces that had lived inside her skull since the fire filled in a single catastrophic rush: the anniversary dinners where she poured champagne while Eleanor looked through her like furniture; the nights she waited in the dark for a husband who never came; the exact cadence of Geoffrey’s voice when he held her face between his hands and asked her to become a murderer for him; the interrogation room; Vivienne’s soft lies; the divorce papers signed in ignorance; the moment she understood she had never been a wife only a disposable shield; the fire; the ceiling coming d

“I was a slave for that bastard’s family.” The words came out raw, scraped from the deepest part of her chest. “For ten years I poured their wine while they looked through me like I was part of the furniture. I swallowed every insult Eleanor dressed up as ‘honesty.’ I smiled when Priscilla laughed at how lucky I was that Geoffrey had taken pity on a girl with no name and no family. I made myself smaller and quieter and more grateful every single day because I believed that if I just endured enough, he would eventually look at me the way he had on our wedding day. I gave them my silence. I gave them my pride. I gave them the best years of my life. And after everything after I walked into a courtroom and destroyed my own name so he could keep his Geoffrey betrayed me with Vivienne.”Her voice cracked, then hardened into something sharper than glass.“She sat beside me in that prison conference room. She held my hand. She looked

Marcus watched him without interrupting. He had served Eric long enough to know when the man was circling something dangerous.“If she is alive..” Marcus began carefully.“If she is alive,” Eric cut in, the words precise and cold, “then she is either the most skilled survivor I have ever encountered, or she is still part of the machine that put Donna on that coastal road and left her there. Either way, I will find her. And when I do, she will look me in the eye and tell me exactly what happened the night my sister died. No lawyers. No prepared statements. No convenient fires. Just the truth.”He walked to the table and opened the original case file again. Donna’s photograph stared up at him from the first page smiling, alive, wearing the red coat they had found thirty feet from her body. The same red coat the fabricated footage had claimed Lottie Smith failed to notice in time.Eric’s hand hovered over the image. Wh

The dining room at Smith’s felt like a setting straight out of a coronation that had taken ten years of waiting to take place.Crystal chandeliers shed their gold light on the mahogany table. White roses, perfect and extravagantly expensive flowers that were already starting to show signs of aging by browning around their edges, spilled out of the silver vases on the tablecloth between the place settings. The smells of the roasted duck, black truffle butter, and perfume belonging to Vivienne hung in the air. This was the same perfume that Geoffrey used to return home drenched in after he said he worked all night long.Geoffrey was sitting at the head of the table. His sleeves were rolled back to just enough for the platinum cufflinks that he received from Vivienne when the whole world pronounced Lottie Smith dead. He seemed relaxed and comfortable. Like a man who finally reached the place where he thought he belonged. But every now and then his gaze shifted towards the empty seat that