Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 249

Chapter 241. Cornered

SEDONA

The drop-off Nick was scheduled for two o’clock. Mrs. Peterson had Nick. Diane, the social worker, was already in the family house centre lobby when I arrived. Diane remained the same unobtrusive warmth person, she during the first visit.

I didn’t see Logan’s car in the main lot. I should have looked harder.

The visit went well. Forty minutes of Nick describing, in exhaustive detail, a science project about volcanoes that had taken over his entire week. I held the information carefully. Completely. The way I held everything now-filing every detail away, because each one was a piece of him I’d missed and was getting back.

When Diane signaled to Nick for time, he hugged me. He walked went with Mrs. Peterson toward the side entrance. I gathered my things and walked toward the parking structure where I’d left my car.

That was where I found Logan. He was standing near the stairwell exit, positioned, I understood this immediately, the way you understand a chess move after the fact, exactly between me and my car. Not blocking the path outright. Just close enough to it that reaching my vehicle meant passing through the space he occupied.

“Sedona,” he said. “Just a minute.”

“I don’t have a minute, Logan.”

“You have a minute.” He fell into step beside me. Not touching. Not technically blocking anything. Close enough that the message was clear without being anything a camera would read as aggression. The same calculated closeness he’d used in the garden – except practiced now. Refined. The version of himself that had learned exactly where the line sat and how to stand right against it without crossing.

I kept walking. He kept pace. “I just want to talk,” he said. Low-voiced. Reasonable. The same tone he always used when he wanted to sound like the wronged party in a conversation he was actively cornering me into.

“Can we talk like adults, for once, without lawyers in the room?”

“No,” I said.

୮

“Sedona.” He said my name the way he used to say it across a dinner table, the specific intimacy of someone who believed he still had rights to it. “We’re still married in every sense that matters. A piece of paper doesn’t undo three years.”

“The piece of paper is the only thing that matters now,” I said. “That’s how divorce works.”

His jaw tightened, fractionally, the only visible crack in the composure. “You think Cameron’s money changes what we built? You think a new name fixes anything?”

“I think you should step back. You’re standing too close.”

13

Comered

He didn’t step back.

“How’s Dante,” he said.

I stopped walking.

Claim

He didn’t ask it. Not really. He said it the way you say something you already know. Testing whether the other person reacts. I turned to face him fully.

“What did you say,” I said slowly.

“I heard there was an incident,” Logan said. His expression didn’t move. That was the thing, there was no triumph in it, no visible malice, nothing a camera or a witness statement could later point to and call a confession. Just the smooth, controlled surface he wore into every room. “Terrible, what happens to people in cities. Things happen to people who get in the way.”

The sentence landed exactly the way he intended it to,close enough to a threat to make my blood run cold, distant enough from one that he could deny, under oath if necessary, that he’d meant anything by it at all.

I did not didn’t move nor did I speak. I had spent three years flinching in rooms with this man. I had spent seven months relearning, slowly and at real cost, how not to.

I did not flinch now. “I’m going to say this once, I said forcefully A small victory I’d think about later.

“From this point forward, you communicate with me only through counsel. Not at drop-offs. Not in parking structures. Not anywhere I am not legally required to be in the same building as you.”

“Sedona”

“And if you approach me again outside of a supervised exchange,” I said, “I will have it on record. Today is already on record.” I glanced, deliberately, toward the corner of the structure where I knew, because Cameron had told me, weeks ago, in the flat factual way he told me everything now, that a security camera covered the stairwell exit. “There are witnesses. There’s footage. You said what you said in front

of both.”

Something flickered behind his composure. The first genuine thing I’d seen from him since the parking structure, not anger exactly, something closer to recalculation, the specific look Cameron had described from the courthouse steps. A man running numbers.

“I haven’t done anything,” Logan said. Quiet now. Careful.

“I didn’t say you had,” I said. “I said things happen to people who get in the way. Your words. I just heard

them.”

I turned and walked to my car. He didn’t follow. I unlocked the door with hands that felt, in the moment, entirely steady. I got in. I started the engine. I pulled out of the parking structure and onto the street with my hands at ten and two, my eyes on the road, every part of my visible self performing complete control.

I made it two blocks. Then the shaking started. Not visible exactly, not at first. Just a fine tremor in my hands. It spread outward until I had to grip the wheel harder to keep the car steady.

My breath came faster than it should have. My vision did something strange. It narrowed and widened in a way that had nothing to do with the actual road in front of me.

23

Comered

+pulled over.

Claim

t put the car in park outside a closed dry cleaner’s, hazard lights ticking in the cold afternoon, and I let it happen. The shaking. The breath I couldn’t fully catch. The full delayed arrival of everything I had not let myself feel in the parking structure, because feeling it there would have given him exactly what he wanted.

I had not flinched in front of him.

I was allowed to flinch now, alone, with no one watching except a Tuesday street that didn’t care.

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