Semua Bab Married to My Enemy : Bab 11 - Bab 20

The headline broke on a Tuesday morning, ugly and deliberate: Trouble in the Voss-Hartley Marriage? Sources Say the Union Is Already Crumbling. Sienna read it standing in the kitchen with her coffee going cold in her hand, scrolling through paragraph after paragraph that cited anonymous staff, quoted conversations that had never happened, and included a photograph of her leaving the estate alone three days earlier, a grocery run, nothing more, twisted through careful editing and a misleading caption into evidence of a marriage in collapse. “This isn’t a coincidence,” Nathaniel said, reading the piece over her shoulder, his voice tight with restrained fury. He’d come down still in his robe, hair still damp from the shower, and the sight of him this unguarded, this furious on her behalf, did something warm to her chest even in the middle of the anger. “This is timed. Someone wants the board questioning the merger right when we’re getting close to something real. Look at the language. I

They came home from the gala circuit performance, three functions in four nights, exhausting and successful, the press already softening their coverage after days of carefully choreographed warmth, to find the study door standing open when Nathaniel was certain, absolutely certain, he’d locked it before they left for the last event.He noticed it first, pausing in the hallway with a stillness that immediately put Sienna on alert, one hand raised to stop her from moving past him into the room.“Stay here,” he murmured.She ignored him almost immediately, following close behind as he pushed the door open the rest of the way with careful caution, as though whoever had been there might still be waiting inside.The room was empty. But the desk had been searched, carefully, almost surgically. Nothing was broken. Nothing was obviously missing at first glance. But Sienna knew the file’s usual arrangement well enough by now, after weeks of late nights working through it, to see that pages had

Reginald Cole delivered the registration documents in person, insisting on meeting somewhere neither family had ever done business, a small, unremarkable coffee shop on the edge of the city, tucked between a laundromat and a shuttered bookstore, three names deep into an alias himself just to make the meeting, wearing a baseball cap that looked almost comical on a man who'd spent his entire career in tailored suits."It took every favor I had left," he said, sliding a thin folder across the table with hands that hadn't stopped trembling since he sat down, his eyes darting periodically toward the door in a way that made Sienna's own nerves tighten in response. "The shell company is called Ashgrove Holdings. Registered eighteen years ago. The listed director is a lawyer who died six years ago, a dead man's name still doing business, which tells you everything about how careful whoever's really behind this has been. They knew exactly how to make the paper trail dead-end at someone who cou

“Marcus,” Nathaniel said again that evening, turning the name over like he was trying to find some hidden edge to it, some detail he’d overlooked in thirty years of family dinners and holiday gatherings. “He’s harmless, Sienna. A little resentful, maybe, always felt overlooked next to my father, but he’s spent the last fifteen years running the marketing division and complaining about golf handicaps. He’s not capable of something like this.”“Then why was his name circled on your aunt’s calendar?”“I don’t know.” He rubbed his jaw, unconvinced by his own dismissal, pacing a slow line across the study floor. “Maybe they had lunch plans. Maybe it means nothing at all. My aunt circles half her calendar in red ink. It’s how she keeps track of anything that matters to her, family birthdays included.”Sienna let it go out loud. She didn’t stop thinking about it.Over the following days, while the investigation into Ashgrove Holdings stalled waiting on Cole’s next lead, she found herself qui

The days that followed were the coldest they’d been since the earliest weeks of the marriage.Sienna didn’t move out of their shared bedroom, not entirely, but she found reasons to stay late at the office, to eat dinner separately, to let the warmth that had grown so naturally between them go quiet under the weight of a doubt she couldn’t fully silence, no matter how much her heart argued against it.She caught herself, more than once, standing outside the study door with her hand raised to knock, only to turn away at the last second, unable to decide whether she was protecting herself or simply punishing them both for something neither of them had actually done.Nathaniel, for his part, didn’t push.He gave her the space she seemed to need, his own hurt visible in the careful, wounded way he watched her from across rooms he used to fill so easily. The easy warmth of the past weeks had been replaced by a stiff, careful politeness that felt almost worse than open conflict would have.H