All Chapters of One Night with My Ex-Fiancé’s Ruthless Brother: Chapter 51 - Chapter 58

(Third Person Limited - Adrian POV) The guest bathroom on the second floor had a lock that actually worked, which was the only reason Adrian had chosen it. Cold water rushed into the basin while Adrian stared at his reflection instead of it, because he needed to think and heat made him feel like he was sinking — and in his phone's notes app, because he needed to write it down to be sure, he'd typed out a timeline. His eyes kept returning to the same date. October.. The boy at the funeral looked — Four? Five? Adrian was terrible at guessing children's ages. Hard to tell with children that age, they ranged, but the child's demeanor and height suggested four, maybe just turned five. He'd kept staring at Draxler across the reception room with those unsettling, assessing eyes, and Keyla had put herself between them with the speed of someone trained for it. October wedding. Child approximately four to five years old. The second calculation didn't help. It only gave him the same answ

(Keyla POV) Holt glanced once around the room before opening the folder in front of him "Before the will can be read," Holt said, "we must confirm all named parties are present." Nobody answered. A chair creaked somewhere to my left. The room he'd chosen for the preliminary meeting was the small sitting room off the library — which was probably deliberate. Nobody would mistake this room for somewhere people came to win arguments.. There were eight chairs arranged in a loose formation, a side table with water, and no flowers, which made it feel more like a boardroom than a house. The room had been stripped of anything that might soften what was about to happen. Eleanor had arrived first and taken the chair that communicated she'd arrived first. She sat with the quiet certainty of someone who expected everyone else to arrange themselves around her. Adrian was beside her, still performing grief in the slightly overworked way he'd been performing it all morning, the expression too cont

(Draxler POV) The study Holt led us to wasn't Augustus's — I'd only ever been brought here when something was about to change, it was one of the smaller working rooms on the east side of the house, a room that had always felt like a holding space between decisions rather than a place where decisions were made. Two chairs. A writing desk. Outside, the kitchen garden had already begun turning brown along the edges Marcus came in behind me. Holt placed the folder carefully on the desk, "I'll give you some privacy." He excused himself. I couldn't tell whether he was being polite or making sure whatever came next happened without witnesses. Then I opened the folder. The first document was a search report. It was a search report — the one Marcus had commissioned eighteen months ago through the private investigative network we used for sensitive matters. I recognized the layout immediately, the specific layout of the header, the reference numbers in the upper right corner. It had been m

(Keyla POV) The smile was already there before she spoke. Vivienne smiled at me like the wedding night had never happened, either she'd forgotten, or she expected me to. I heard her heels before I saw her. She'd found me in the garden corridor during the half hour between meetings — the passage that ran along the back of the house, open to the garden on one side, with windows onto the frost-killed hedgerows and a runner that had been there long enough to show paths in it. More to avoid thinking than because I expected an immediate reply. I'd been checking my phone, waiting for a response from Priscilla about the afternoon's legal schedule. Vivienne appeared from the far end with the unhurried pace of someone who'd timed the encounter. She didn't call my name right away. "Keyla." Warm. Genuinely warm-sounding, which was the thing about Vivienne — She'd always known exactly how much warmth to put into her voice with enough technical accuracy to delay the moment of recognition. Her e