Novelas de Aveline Kryss

Damien read the message over my shoulder, his expression calm despite what it said. “What do you want to do?”“I need to speak to her directly.”“Do you want me there?”“Beside me,” I said. “Not speaking for me.”He nodded as though that was the only answer he had expected. Before I made the call, he asked whether I was ready.“I don’t think I’ll ever feel ready.”“You don’t have to finish the conversation if she refuses to be honest,” he said. “You can leave before she decides you have heard enough.”Nobody had ever told me that before. I had spent my whole life remaining in painful conversations until everyone else felt satisfied, no matter what staying there cost me.My mother answered the video call looking cautious, already preparing herself for something. “Did something happen with Ava?”Instead of answering, I held Ava’s message toward the camera. I watched my mother’s face change as she read it.“Did you tell Ava where Ethan had left Damien’s letter?”“Yes.”There was no denia

Damien read the message over my shoulder, quiet for a moment before he spoke. “She knew what Ethan was hiding from you.”I checked the date again. Months before the engagement party. Possibly before the date Ethan had claimed, the night he stood in front of everyone and called it a year-long affair like the timeline was something fixed and certain.“I need to ask her,” I said.Damien asked whether I wanted her brought here, called, or met somewhere neutral. I chose video. I wanted to see her face.She answered already tired, already suspicious, the way she’d sounded every time I called since the wedding. “If this is about Ethan—”“This is not about whether he loves you,” I said.I held up the message instead. I watched her face change before she said a single word, and that change told me everything the printed page already had.“Why did you remove Damien’s letter?” I asked.“Ethan said Damien was manipulating you,” she said. “I thought I was protecting your engagement.”“Why didn’t y

“What did he mean,” I asked, “by another reason to question where she belongs?”Damien took the folder back gently and looked through what remained inside it. “There may be more here,” he said. We went through the rest together, his shoulder close to mine, both of us quiet in the particular way that meant neither of us wanted to be the one to find whatever came next.I found it near the bottom, a single printed page, the formatting clean and professional in a way that told me immediately it had once come from his office and not his heart.Your refusal gave us the time we needed to protect the property. You protected people who could offer you nothing in return. I would like to thank you personally, and to show you what your decision saved, if you’re willing.It wasn’t romantic. It didn’t need to be. It was simply someone noticing.“I never saw this,” I said.“My office sent it through Ethan’s family,” Damien said slowly, the realization settling into his voice as he spoke. “You’d work

Chapter 31: Before You Knew Me“Start at the beginning,” I said.Damien took a breath, the kind he took when he was deciding exactly how much room a sentence needed before he said it. His mother, he told me, had built a women’s centre years ago, a place for women who’d lost everything to divorce, widowhood, or family abandonment, somewhere they could find work training and small business funding and a reason to start again. She’d folded a scholarship foundation into it eventually. The building itself sat on land that had grown more valuable than anyone intended.After his mother died, Ethan’s family saw an opportunity. They proposed what they called an expansion, a glossy plan that actually meant closing the original centre, moving the foundation into something smaller, and turning the property into luxury development. Damien said it the way he said most painful things, flat, controlled, like keeping his voice even was the only way to get through it at all.“I was asked to review the

Damien didn’t answer right away. He stood there with Claire’s words still hanging in the room, and for a moment I let myself believe he was actually considering it, that the safest path really did mean pretending none of this had ever become real.“You do not have to answer now,” his grandmother said gently.“Yes, I do.” He turned to me, not to her, not to Claire. “I will not protect this marriage by lying to my wife.”He said it plainly, the way he said most things, like the decision had already been made somewhere inside him before anyone asked the question out loud. Whatever official response they drafted could admit the truth. The marriage had begun as protection, strategy, something close to revenge on both our parts. He wasn’t going to dress that up as anything softer.“We did not marry for love,” he said. “That does not mean love was forbidden from finding us afterward.”He asked Claire and his grandmother to give us a moment. Claire left without protest, but his grandmother li

“Do you think she leaked it?” I asked.Damien didn’t defend his grandmother automatically. “I think she knows more than she told us.”“Was any of her kindness real?”“I won’t answer for her,” he said. “We’ll ask her together.”By morning, the image still sat between us like a warning. Damien had already asked his grandmother to come to the penthouse, but he brought me water first and settled beside me, his gaze falling to the ring on my hand.“Do you regret last night?” I asked.“No.”“Even with this waiting for us?”“Last night is the one thing I do not regret.”His grandmother arrived composed, as always, though something in her expression shifted when she saw the quiet ease between us. Damien showed her the image.“Were you speaking to that reporter?” he asked.“Yes.”“Did you tell them where the wedding was?” I asked.“Yes.”She explained that reporters had already been circling, someone else had leaked that a wedding was happening, and she’d chosen one reporter she trusted to con