All Chapters of Lovely Little Liar : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

NIKOLAI POV "Nikolai. This is Rafael Moreno."My father said it with confidence, making an introduction like he had made a hundred times before, gesturing between us like he was presenting a gift."Rafael's family and ours go back a long way. His father and I did business together back when you were still in school." My father clapped Rafael on the shoulder. "He'll be taking over one of our subsidiaries under the new structure. I expect you two will be working closely together."I stared at him.I kept my face still — that part I could do, that part had been trained into me since before I could tie a tie properly — but underneath the stillness something was happening I didn't have a name for. The man in front of me. The man whose name I had been chasing for weeks. The man who had taken Arianna, who had given her a son, who had been the reason she chose to disappear from my life rather than stay in it.And my father was standing here with his hand on his shoulder like they were old fr

ARIANNA. POV The door opened and Nikolai walked in.He had food. Noah was asleep on the bed, one arm thrown over his face, breathing deep and even. I had been sitting in the armchair watching him when Nikolai came in.I stood and crossed to Nikolai and took the bag from him."Thank you." I smiled when I said it. "You didn't have to do this."He looked at me."How are you?" I asked. My eyes moved over his face. "You look really good today."Something happened in his expression that I hadn't been prepared for.He smiled. Not the controlled half-smile he usually gave me. Not the cold smile from the early days when he was making a point. A real one, like something had happened today that he was still feeling around the edges of.That smile made me nervous in a way I couldn't immediately explain.Nikolai in a bad mood I could read. Nikolai cold, Nikolai controlled, Nikolai angry — I had maps for all of those. Nikolai quietly pleased about something I didn't know about was a different coun

ARIANNA POV "Arianna."Mrs. Kate stood in the doorway with one hand pressed to her chest, her eyes moving over me and then down to Noah and then back up."I'm fine," I said before she could ask. "I don't have time to explain. I need your phone."She stepped back and let us in without a word.The apartment was exactly as I had left it — the same small lamp, the same smell of tea and something faintly floral. Noah's head was still on my shoulder, heavy and warm. He had been silent the whole taxi ride, which was so unlike him that it had scared me more than his crying would have.I set him down on the couch and he sat there looking around with the wide, processing expression of a child catching up to events."Stay right here," I told him. "Don't move."He nodded.Mrs. Kate handed me her phone. I took it and dialled my father's number from memory — the same number I had been calling since I was a teenager, the number I had memorised. My thumb stopped.I looked at the screen, and the numb

NIKOLAI Pov I got to the bar early, not because I was eager, but because I wanted to be seated when he walked in. I wanted to watch him enter the room, clock me, and cross the distance to where I was — so that by the time he sat down, the dynamic was already established. The Montgomery was quiet at this hour. Dark wood, low light, this was exactly the kind of bar that didn't play music loud enough to interrupt a conversation. I had chosen it for exactly that reason. I ordered a drink and waited. The door opened at seven past seven. Rafael Moreno walked in and I watched him from across the room. He looked good. He was tall, had dark features, a sharp jaw, and walked with ease like he belonged in a room. There was something familiar in his architecture that I didn't want to examine too closely. He scanned the room. When he found me, he smiled. He crossed the bar with his hands in his pockets and his posture easy and unhurried and I sat there and watched him come and told myself,

NIKOLAI POV I had made a decision somewhere between leaving her room last night and waking up this morning.If Arianna refused to give me the truth, I was going to build a situation that forced it out.She had been lying about her death for five years. She had constructed a reason and a story and had stuck to it across weeks of pressure, and I respected the discipline of that even as it made me want to break something. But every structure had a load-bearing wall, and I had been pressing on them one by one long enough to know which one it was.Noah.The boy was the wall. Everything else she had deflected, absorbed, given me partial truths and calibrated lies on — everything except the things that came close to him. The moment the conversation touched Noah, her tells multiplied. Her voice changed. Her body moved differently.She had faked her death to protect something. And whatever that something was, it lived in that child.So I was going to stop pressing on the wall directly and sta