Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 251

The Filing-2

“Panic,” I said.

“Panic,” she confirmed. “Which is good for us in the custody matter. It reads as exactly what it is to any judge with experience, a stall tactic dressed up as concern. But Cameron.” Her voice shifted slightly. “I want you to hear this part clearly. A man filing panicked motions is a man who feels cornered. Cornered people don’t always behave more carefully. Sometimes they behave less carefully.”

I was quiet for a moment.

“I know,” I said.

I sat with that after I hung up,’ longer than the conversation itself had taken.

Adaeze’s reading was correct. But professionally, this filing was weak, transparent, and built on omission rather than fact. And it would not survive serious scrutiny in January. I believed that. I had read enough litigation in my career to recognize panic dressed up as strategy. When I saw it, I faked a smile.

I noticed its weakness, but I didn’t say out loud to Adaeze because it wasn’t a legal assessment. It was something closer to instinct honed across seventeen months of watching this particular man operate. It was usually quieter and harder to put down once I’d picked it up.

Logan was coming apart.

The stalking complaint, the garden, the operative in Seattle, the stolen car, the attack on Dante that had nearly killed him, the financial trail now closing in three shells deep, and now this, a filing so thin it would embarrass any competent attorney who’d had time to think it through properly. Each escalation had been more reckless than the last, less controlled, less concealed.

A controlled man did not file something this transparent. A controlled man waited, calculated, built a case slowly, the way he’d built everything else in his life. This was a man who had stopped being able to wait.

I thought about what Adaeze had said. Cornered people don’t always behave more carefully.

I thought about Dante’s bandaged forearm. About a knife instead of a gun, quieter, more deniable, the specific cold calculation of a December order that had not stopped existing just because its first attempt had failed.

ľ

I thought about Sedona, three weeks from the January ruling, finally winning again, the match, the access order, the visit at the school gate, Nick’s sign in the hallway, every single piece of ground she had fought to reclaim, sitting directly in the path of a man who was running out of careful moves and increasingly willing to make uncareful ones.

I picked up my phone and called Marcus Reeve.

“I need eyes on Logan Hayes,” I said. “Not the operative,him. Directly. Starting today.”

A pause on Marcus’s end. “You think he’s planning something himself now. Not delegating.”

“I think a desperate man stops trusting other people to do things correctly,” I said. “I think the filing today tells us he’s run out of patience for the slow version of this.” I looked out the kitchen window at Chicago, grey and ordinary, indifferent to everything happening inside it. “I’m not waiting for January to find out I

12

The Filing 2

was right.

“On it,” Marcus said.

Claim

I hung up and sat at the table with the filing still open in front of me, the fever, the affidavits, the careful omissions, and underneath my certainty that Adaeze would dismantle every word of it in court, I held the other certainty, the one I hadn’t said to either of them yet.

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