Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 140

Chapter 135: Friends in unlikely Places>

Sedona’s POV

“Okay,” I said.

Clam

He left through the side gate, not back through the house, which meant he had known about the side gate, which meant he had been here before tonight, looking at the property, and that was information I was going to have to think about carefully.

I stood in the garden after the gate closed and felt the quiet come back in.

Dante turned to look at me. He didn’t ask if I was all right in the way people asked when they wanted reassurance for themselves. He just looked at me with the direct quality he had, checking the facts of the

situation.

“I’m fine,” I said, before he asked.

“I know,” he said. “Are you ready to go back in?”

I looked at the garden. The October plants, still holding their color. The stone path under my feet. The muffled sound of forty-three people who loved me on the other side of the door.

“Give me one more minute,” I said.

“Take it,” he said, and stood there quietly while I did.

We went back in through the door together, Dante slightly ahead of me, and the warmth of the house came out to meet us in a wave-the food smell, the sound of several conversations happening at once, the particular quality of a room that had been filled with people who had known each other for years and had relaxed into that knowing.

I had taken my minute. The garden was behind us. Logan was behind us. I was keeping it there for now, not because it didn’t matter but because I had forty-three people who had come here because I was alive, and I owed them the present tense of me rather than the version that was still standing in the garden running calculations.

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Lucian found us almost immediately.

He was just inside the door, slightly to the left, and he had his phone out, which was the first thing I noticed. He looked up when we came in and he looked at me with the swift, assessing glance of someone who had registered that something had happened, and then he looked at Dante, and then he looked back

at me.

“I have a video,” he said.

I stopped. “What?”

He turned the phone toward me. The screen showed the garden, the angle slightly elevated, which meant he had filmed it from one of the upstairs windows, or possibly from the doorway before he’d decided to stay back. The video was clear enough. Logan’s hand on my arm. Dante stepping in. Logan swinging.

7:3

<Friends In unirkely Places

Dante redirecting the arm with a precision that looked, in the footage, almost like choreography.

Claim

“I also have a photograph of him arriving through the side gate,” Lucian said, scrolling back. “Timestamped. And thave his face clearly on the video when he grabbed you the first time.” He looked up. “Do you want me to call the police, or would you prefer I get Cameron first?”

I stared at him.

He held the phone steady, waiting, not making the decision for me.

“How did you think to do that?” I asked.

Something shifted in his expression, not quite amusement but close to it. “Unstable people try a lot of things with my boss,” he said. “Usually as groundwork for some kind of legal action. You learn to document quickly. I had my phone out before he reached you the second time.”

I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t fully realized was tight. The laugh came out before I could decide whether it was appropriate, not a large laugh, but real, the kind that arrived when something was both absurd and exactly right.

“Crazy women,” I said.

“And occasionally men,” he said. “I try not to discriminate.”

“You thought of that faster than I did,” I said. “I was standing there thinking about whether my legs would hold if I needed to move, and you were upstairs with your phone.”

“You had other things to manage,” he said, without any particular weight to it. Just a statement of fact.

I looked at the video one more time. Logan’s face was clear. The grab was clear. The swing was undeniably clear. It was, as documentation went, comprehensive.

“Keep it,” I said. “I’m not going to use it tonight. But if he comes back, if he tries anything else, I want it

I

ready.”

“It’s already saved in two places,” Lucian said. He put the phone back in his pocket with the efficiency of someone returning a tool to its place after use. “I can send it to you at any time.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Genuinely.”

He nodded once, the nod of someone who had done a thing and considered it done.

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