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Chapter 73: Peaceful day
publish date:
2026-06-12 20:04:27
Latest chapter
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 108: Should I trust her?
OLIVIA’S POVHe was quiet for a moment after I asked.Not the hesitation of someone who did not have an answer. Jaden always had answers. This was the specific pause of someone deciding something about how to give an answer.Then he said:“The decision is yours.”I stared at him.Four words.I sat across from him in the study and turned those four words over and felt something shift in the room that had nothing to do with Elena or the note or any of the strategy that surrounded all of it.“Jaden,” I said carefully. “You always have an opinion.”“I have several,” he said. “I also know that Elena Cross reached out to you specifically. Not to me. Not to my legal team. Not to Sarah Jules.” He paused. “To you. Whatever she is offering or asking, the trust that makes it possible exists between you and her. Not between her and anyone else in this.” He held my gaze. “That means the decision about what to do with it belongs to you.”I sat with that.The study held its quiet around us.I though
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 107: Elena Reaches out again
OLIVIA’S POVOn a Thursday afternoon, the notes arrived. Not through any digital channel. Not through the social media message that Elena had sent the first time, the one that had arrived on my phone with its careful phrasing and its woman to woman appeal that I had screenshot and shown to Jaden and eventually acted on at a café in the west side of the city.This was different.A handwritten envelope. My name on the front in handwriting that was neat and deliberate, the handwriting of someone who had been taught to write properly and had maintained the habit. Delivered to the house address by what Clara told me was a private courier service, not a standard delivery company, the kind that charged considerably more because what they were actually selling was discretion.I picked it up from the hall table where Clara had left it.Looked at my name on the front.Turned it over.No return address.I opened it in the sitting room.The note was three paragraphs.Written on heavy paper. The
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 106: Her Question
OLIVIA’S POVThe house was different that evening.Not in any way I could have pointed to concretely. The furniture was in its usual configuration. Clara had made dinner the way she always made dinner. The staff moved through their routines with the same quiet efficiency.But something in the atmosphere had shifted.The specific quality of a house that contained a significant day and was still settling around it.I had spent the afternoon in the sitting room. Not reading. Not watching anything. Just being in the house while the day moved through its stages outside the window. The press conference coverage cycling through the news. The Cross Holdings stock numbers appearing in updates on my phone that I had not set up to receive but were arriving through news alerts anyway because the story had become large enough to trigger general financial news notifications.I had not gone back to the study after I knocked and Jaden said yes and I nodded and left.That moment had felt complete in i
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 105: Jaden watches
JADEN’S POVI had watched a lot of press conferences in my career.They were a specific kind of theater. Everyone in the room understood the rules. The person at the podium had prepared for a defined set of questions and was managing the room toward those questions. The journalists had their own agenda and were managing toward that. The cameras were capturing both agendas simultaneously and the audience at home was watching the gap between them.I had watched enough of them to know that the interesting moment was never in the prepared statement.It was always in the gap.The four second pause. The micro shift in posture. The specific quality of silence that fell when a question landed somewhere the preparation had not reached.I stood at the window of my study with Ethan beside me and the television mounted on the far wall playing the Cross family press conference live and I watched for the gap.Ethan had positioned himself slightly to my left. Not beside me exactly. The specific dist
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 104: The cross family fights back
OLIVIA’S POVI watched the press conference from the sitting room.Jaden was in the study. He had been in the study since seven that morning when Ethan had arrived and the two of them had gone in and closed the door with the specific energy of people who had something significant to monitor and intended to monitor it properly.I had not been invited to the study.I had not expected to be.This part of it, the public facing part, the press conference and the cameras and the Cross family’s attempt to manage the narrative in real time, was not something I had a role in. My role had been the detail remembered from a late night conversation years ago. The documents I had carried from a café meeting. The trust I had built with a woman on the other side of the situation who had needed someone to tell her that both could be true.That was done.What happened now was Jaden’s.I turned on the television at nine fifty five and sat in the armchair and waited.Leonard Cross was not what I had expe
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 103: Adrian’s Empire cracks
JADEN’S POVThe article dropped on a Wednesday morning at six forty seven AM.I know the exact time because I was already awake when the notification came through. Not from restlessness. From the specific alertness of someone who had known something was coming and had been sleeping lightly for three days in anticipation of the sound of it landing.I had been in contact with the journalist, Sarah Jules, for six weeks.Not directly. Through a channel clean enough that nothing could be traced back to me in a way that would compromise the story’s independence. The story needed to stand on its own. Needed to be verifiable from the documents themselves without my fingerprints visible on the framing. The moment it became my story rather than the evidence’s story it became something that could be dismissed as vendetta.I had been patient about that.Eleven years of patience had made six weeks feel like nothing.I sat up in bed and opened the article on my phone.Read it once quickly to get th
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 75: The filling
JADEN’S POVThe filing arrived on a Wednesday.Ethan brought it to me in the late morning with the expression he wore when he was delivering something he had already assessed and did not like the assessment of. He set it on my desk without preamble and stepped back.I picked it up.Read the cover p
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 3: Unknown Number
JADEN’S POVThe city always looked different from the top floor. Very clean and quiet. Like all the filth and desperation below couldn’t quite reach the glass walls of my office.I stood beside the window with one hand tucked into my pocket while the other lazily swirled the whiskey in my glass, my
THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 2: Fifty thousand dollars
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THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE Chapter 1: The wedding without the bride
Olivia’s POV My legs were shaking on the tiled floor. Not because of the loud bang coming from the speakers but because my whole body stopped working the moment I stepped inside the registry. “I, Elena Brook , take you, Adrian Cross, to be my lawful married husband. For better or worse, in pover
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