All Chapters of THE HEIRESS HE THREW AWAY : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Three months. I stood in the doorway with those words ringing in my ears, and nobody in the room seemed to notice that I had stopped breathing. Madam Hart swept back toward the dining room, already calling for tea, and Lucian followed her without a glance in my direction.Serena lowered herself onto the sofa again, one hand resting on her stomach, and Mia climbed straight back into her lap as if she had never left it. That was how it ended. There was no apology and no explanation, only a house closing over the moment like water over a dropped stone.I did not leave. I still do not fully know why, except that some part of me wanted to see exactly how deep this went, the way you press on a bruise to learn its size. I sat down in the armchair by the window, the one nobody ever used, and I watched my own family from the outside.Serena opened her handbag and took out a small velvet box. "I brought something for the princess of this house," she said, smiling. Inside lay a tiny silver brace

I went upstairs after breakfast and closed the bedroom door behind me. For eight years I had waited in that room for someone to knock, someone to apologize, someone to come and say that they had made a mistake. This time I did not wait for anything. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the house go on without me, the clatter of dishes, the murmur of the maids, Serena laughing somewhere below.Lucian had told me he did not care if I died. Mia had told me she did not want me either. Madam Hart had only turned a page of her newspaper. Three people, one answer, and I had heard every word of it with my own ears.I thought about the doctor, and the calm way she had said six months. I had walked out of her office thinking I had no time left, but sitting there I finally understood the truth of it. I had plenty of time. I had simply been spending it in the wrong place, on the wrong people, begging for something they had never intended to give me.If I stayed, I would spend every remain

The first thing I felt was light, a pale white glare pressing against my closed eyelids. The second was pain, dull and heavy across my ribs and forehead, as though something had been laid on top of me while I slept. A machine beeped softly beside my bed, and the air smelled sharply of antiseptic. For a few seconds I did not know where I was, and then the headlights came back all at once, huge and white and impossibly fast, and my breath caught so hard that the beeping began to race."Please do not move. You are safe."The voice was low and unsteady. I turned my head carefully and saw a young man sitting beside my bed with his hands clasped tightly between his knees. His face was pale, and his eyes were red, as if he had not slept for days. He looked at me the way a person looks at a verdict he is afraid to hear.I recognized him without knowing how. Somewhere in the blur of breaking glass and screaming metal, I had seen his face through the windshield of the other car, white with horr

My eldest brother did not raise his voice. He took out his phone, spoke four quiet words into it, and within a minute the corridor outside my door filled with men in dark suits who moved without a sound. I watched through the gap in the curtain as two black cars slid out of the shadows and boxed in the sedan parked across the street. For a few seconds nothing happened, and then the sedan's door flew open and the driver bolted into the dark."He escaped on foot," my brother said, listening to his earpiece. His voice was perfectly level, but his knuckles had tightened around the phone. "My men have the car. Give me ten minutes."It took twelve. When he came back, he laid the facts before us like cards on a table. The driver was gone, and the plate belonged to a shell company that had been registered only a month ago, with no named owner and no trail. Someone had planned this carefully, and my brother who had been driving went white at the words, as though he were hearing his own fear sp

The maid was caught before dawn, and my eldest brother questioned her himself. He told us the result in the dining room, standing straight and cold with his silver rimmed glasses catching the pale light. His voice was level, but I noticed that his hands stayed clasped behind his back, as if he did not trust them."A woman paid her," he said. "She never saw a face. She was told to leave the bracelet on your pillow and whisper two words to the empty room before she left.""What two words?" my mother asked. Her hands were shaking around her teacup.My brother looked at me before he answered. "Welcome back."A chill ran down my arms. Whoever had chosen those words had known exactly when I would come home, and I thought of the black car outside the hospital, and the plate with no owner, and I felt the shape of something enormous moving beneath the surface of my new life. Someone had been waiting for me. Someone had been waiting for a very long time."There is one more thing you should know