Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 275

Chapter 263. Reeve’s tast Piece.

CAMERON

Marcus called at four in the afternoon,.

“It’s done,” he said. “The intermediary entered a full cooperation agreement this morning. Recorded statement, signed, the works.”

After a while, I sat down at the kitchen table without quite deciding the best way to approach the whole thing. My mind was not settled. “Tell me.”

“He’s named Logan directly,” Marcus said. “Not implied through the financial trail, not inferred through corroborating circumstantial evidence. Named. On record, audio and transcript both. He describes the instructions relayed to him from Logan personally, not even fully through cutouts, toward the end. Logan got impatient with the layers of insulation he’d built and started communicating more directly than his own operation should have allowed.

“The intermediary describes specific conversations. Specific dates. Specific amounts that match the shell account transfers we’d already traced.”

I closed my eyes.

“This is it.”

“This is it,” Marcus confirmed. “The DA’s office has what they need to move toward an indictment. I’d expect that to happen within the month, maybe faster, given the strength of what just landed. Attempted murder, conspiracy charges layered on top of the financial crimes already in motion.” A pause. “Cameron, this is the kind of evidence that ends careers and ends freedom. There’s no version of this Logan talks his way out of.”

I sat with the phone against my ear, the kitchen quiet around me, and let the full weight of seventeen months settle into something that finally, completely, had an ending in sight.

I went to find Sedona. She was in the sitting room with a cup of tea gone cold beside her, going through Adaeze’s latest filing notes for the February hearing. She looked up when I came in, and something in my face must have told her this wasn’t an ordinary update, because she set the notes down immediately.

“Cameron.”

“Reeve’s last piece came through,” I said. I sat down across from her. Took my time with it. She deserved the full shape of it, not just the headline.

“The intermediary is cooperating fully. He’s named Logan directly, on a recorded statement. Specific conversations, specific dates, transfers that match what Marcus already had traced.” I held her eyes. “This is the evidentiary turning point, Sedona. The DA’s office has enough now to move toward an indictment.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“He named him,” she said. “Logan. Directly.”

113

Raeve’s Last Prece

“Directly, I confirmed.

t watched her process this the way she processed everything important, slowly, completely, no rush to land on the feeling before she’d actually located it.

“What happens now?” she said.

“Adaeze moves to formally introduce this in the custody proceedings, it strengthens everything for February enormously, beyond what we already had. Separately, on the criminal side, the DA’s office builds toward an indictment. Grand jury, formal charges, an arrest. I kept my voice level, the careful flatness I used when I needed her to hear the facts clearly before either of us let the feeling underneath them take over. “Conspiracy to commit murder. Attempted murder.

The financial crimes on top of that. This isn’t a case that gets quietly settled or talked down anymore. This case will end in a trial, or a plea that amounts to the same admission.”

She nodded slowly, looking past me at the window. In Chicago, in its grey afternoon light.

“I should feel something bigger than I do,” she said quietly. “Shouldn’t I? This is what we’ve been building toward.”

This is the thing that protects Nick, that protects Dante, that finally makes all of this real in a way nobody can argue away.” She looked at me. “Why does it just feel heavy?”

I understood the question, because I had been sitting with the exact same one since Marcus’s call.

“I think,” I said carefully, “it’s because winning this isn’t actually simple. Not the way winning usually feels simple. We’re not just winning a custody case anymore, or even just stopping a threat. We’re watching someone who was your husband, someone who held Nick the day he was born, someone who sat at family dinners and was, however briefly, part of what we all called family, become, on paper, a criminal defendant. A man facing decades in prison for trying to have your partner killed. That’s not a small thing to feel complicated about. I’d be more worried if you felt nothing at all.”

“Do you feel complicated about it?” she asked. “Or is it simpler for you?”

I thought about this honestly. Because she deserved the honest answer rather than the protective one.

“I feel something complicated too,” I said. “I’ve spent seventeen months wanting exactly this outcome, wanting him stopped, wanting him held fully accountable, wanting every piece of what he did laid out where it couldn’t be denied or managed or talked around by a careful lawyer. I still want that. I’m not going to pretend I don’t feel something like relief, even satisfaction, now that it’s finally landed, I feel pity for him because he was once your husband and the love of your life.” I held her eyes.

Sedona was quiet for a long time.

“I keep thinking about Nick,” she said finally. “He’s going to grow up knowing this, eventually. That his father tried to have someone killed. That his father is, right now, somewhere becoming a criminal defendant instead of just a difficult man in a custody dispute.” She looked at me. “How do I hold that for him? How do I make sure he doesn’t carry it as some kind of inherited shame? Like, it’s something wrong with him instead of something wrong with Logan?”

“You tell him the truth, eventually, in pieces he can hold,” I said. “The way you’ve told him everything else. Careful. Age-appropriate. Never more than he’s ready for, but never less than honest, either. You let him

23

Raeve’s Lust Preca

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