All Chapters of The wrong vow: I BECAME MY EX'S AUNT : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

"We Have Until Morning" --- "We have until morning," Maya said, standing up, the document in her hand. "So tell me exactly what we do with the next eight hours." Elias was already moving. --- "The document goes to the federal contact tonight. Not tomorrow. Physical copy and digital scan. Two separate channels." "If we send it tonight before Roland knows the safe was opened" "Then by the time he finds out and tells Julian, it's already in federal hands. Julian can't suppress what the government already has." Maya set the document on the table. Looked at it. Thirty-one years old. Her father's handwriting in the margin, small notations she didn't have time to read properly. Julian Hartwell's signature at the bottom, real and specific and damning. "What about Cass? Roland will check the access logs. He'll see it was her biometric." "Felix is already moving Cass to a secure location. She agreed." Maya looked at him. "You told Felix before we even came back from the

"I Needed You Both Visible" --- "That was you," Maya said, the moment Cass sat down. "The message this morning. 'Someone who is not your enemy.'" "Yes," Cass said. "You've been watching Roland's house." "For eleven years." --- Same park. Same bench. Cass had chosen it again, open enough to be safe, quiet enough to talk. Maya had come alone this time without being asked to. Felix was nearby; she hadn't told him to hide. "You timed the break-in deliberately," Maya said. "You waited until Roland was at Victoria's dinner with us in the room, to go into the safe." "Yes." "You used our dinner as cover." "The same way Roland used it as his alibi. Yes." "And the public exposure, Roland's filing, the headlines this morning." Maya watched her face. "Did you know that was coming?" A pause. "I knew Roland would react the moment he found the safe accessed. I knew his reaction would be to attack the marriage, it's the fastest way to destabilize your alliance with Elias."

"Your Father Was The Best Man I Ever Worked For"---"Your father was the best man I ever worked for," Eleanor said, before Maya had even sat down. "I want you to know that first. Before anything else. He was a genuinely good man in a room full of people who were pretending to be."Maya sat down. She looked at the woman in the chair by the window. Eighty years old, frail through the shoulders, but the eyes were the eyes of someone who had been keeping track of things for a very long time and had not lost a single item from the list.---"How long did you work for Ashgrove?" Maya said."Eleven years. From the founding until the month after your father died. Then I left, I couldn't stay, not after." Eleanor's hands were folded in her lap, settled. "From the very first day. I kept the books. Which means I saw everything, every transaction, every agreement, every decision that was made inside that company.""Including the share reorganization," Elias said."Including that. I watched Rich

"He Lied And Everyone Knows It" --- The correction ran on every outlet that had carried the original story, and it used Roland Voss's name in the same sentence as the word "fraud," and Maya watched it happen from a window and felt something that was not quite satisfaction but was the closest neighbor to it. --- Nadia called at nine. "Every outlet is running it. Roland's PR team has gone completely silent, no statement, no rebuttal, nothing." "He's not fighting it." Maya kept her eyes on the city below. "No. Which is strange. A man who moved that fast to file and distribute, going dark the moment it's disproven?" "He got what he needed." "Forty-eight hours of siblings headlines." "Yes. Whatever he was doing in those forty-eight hours, he's done it now. The filing served its purpose." A pause on the line. "Maya. What was he doing?" "I don't know yet." She turned from the window. "But I'm about to find out." --- Damien's lawyer called an hour later. Elias pu

"I Never Left Voluntarily" --- "I never left voluntarily," Marcus Grey said, from across the table, looking twenty years older than any photograph Maya had ever found. "I want you to know that before anything else. I didn't run." He was thin — the specific thinness of someone who had been somewhere small for a long time. The federal officer who had let them in stood near the door and stayed there, which was the arrangement Marcus had insisted on before he'd agree to meet anyone. He had been insisting on things carefully, Maya understood, for seven years. "You sealed the adoption papers," she said. "Thirty-one years ago. I was just starting — the Voss family was my first significant client. Roland came to me privately, not through the family's usual firm. He wanted the adoption papers for Elder Elias sealed and re-filed in a jurisdiction where they wouldn't be easily found." "Did you know why?" "He said it was to protect Elder Elias. That Elias didn't know he was adopted