Marry Ex's Billionaire Uncle After Divorce (Aurora and Jasper) novel Chapter 142

Chapter 106 Carried in His Arms

Chapter 106: Carried in His Arms

(Author’s POV)

Phineas got back to the apartment just after ten-thirty.

25 Points

He’d had Benny run a full trace on Jasper’s movements at the Hargrove building every camera, every timestamp, every logged entry and exit. The report came back within the hour: the elevator malfunction was confirmed as mechanical failure, unrelated to any external interference, and the timing of Jasper’s presence on that floor had no detectable connection to William’s schedule.

Phineas read the report twice.

He set his phone down on the kitchen counter and stood there for a long moment, the apartment quiet around him. The city hummed faintly beyond the windows. He looked at nothing in particular.

Jasper had just gotten lucky. That was what the evidence said. Jasper had been in the right place at the right time through sheer, infuriating coincidence, and now William was having dinner with him and calling it gratitude. Phineas pressed two fingers to the edge of the counter and breathed out slowly through his

nose.

He walked down the hallway to Aurora’s door and knocked.

Silence.

He knocked again. “Aurora.”

Nothing.

He pulled out his phone and called her. Straight to voicemail. He sent a message. No response. He called again – voicemail again, her recorded voice telling him calmly that she wasn’t available, the tone so characteristically unhurried that it only sharpened the unease settling in his chest.

He stood in the hallway and thought about what she’d mentioned that morning. Working late. Data sets to finish. She’d said it the way she always said things – matter-of-factly, like it was nothing, like the hours she kept were simply the natural shape of her days.

Something shifted in his chest.

He grabbed his jacket off the hook by the door and left.

The security guard at the research building’s front desk startled when Phineas walked in, the glass doors swinging shut behind him with a cold gust of night air.

“Mr. Everett-”

“The elevator.”

“Out of service, sir. Maintenance can’t get here until morning.”

Phineas was already walking toward the stairwell.

Chapter 106 Camed in His Arris

+25 FOU

He took the stairs to the fifth floor without stopping, his footsteps even and unhurried on the concrete. The hallway was dark except for a faint glow at the far end the lab. He walked toward it and looked through the glass panel in the door.

Aurora was asleep on the small sofa in the corner, her lab coat pulled up over her shoulders like a blanket, her hair loose against the cushion. Her notes were spread across the low table in front of her, a pen still loosely caught between her fingers.

4

He tried the door. Locked. He looked at the keyway and saw it immediately a piece of stiff cardstock, folded and snapped off, wedged neatly into the cylinder. Deliberate. Precise. Not an accident, not negligence.

His expression went flat.

He went back downstairs, found a narrow tool kit in the security office, and returned to the fifth floor. It took him eight minutes to work the fragment out of the lock without damaging the mechanism, his movements careful and methodical in the dim hallway. The door swung open.

The hinge gave a soft click.

Aurora’s eyes opened. She sat up slowly, blinking against the light from the hallway, and looked at him standing in the doorway – jacket still on, something unreadable in his face.

“Phineas?”

“Get your things.”

क

She stared at him for another second, still half-asleep, then her gaze dropped to his sleeve. There was a faint grey smudge on his shirt cuff – graphite dust from the cardstock, from working the lock by hand in the

dark.

She looked at it for a moment and didn’t say anything. She stood, gathered her bag and notes without asking questions, and followed him out.

The elevator was still down. They took the stairs. The motion-sensor lights in the stairwell flickered – on for thirty seconds, then off, then on again as they moved down each flight, the rhythm of it strangely mechanical in the quiet.

They were rounding the landing between the fourth and third floors when Aurora’s foot came down on the edge of a step wrong. Her ankle rolled sharply. She hissed through her teeth and grabbed for the wall, her bag swinging hard against her hip.

Phineas was already turning. He didn’t ask. He bent down, got one arm under her knees and one behind her back, and lifted her in a single clean motion, as though she weighed nothing at all.

Aurora grabbed his neck before she’d thought about it, her fingers curling instinctively against his collar. Her bag swung against his side.

“I can walk,” she said.

Chapter 106 Caned in His Ame

“You can’t.”

She didn’t argue again. They were close enough that she could feel the steady rhythm of his heartbeat through his chest – even and unhurried, completely at odds with the fact that he’d just climbed five flights of stairs and was now carrying her down four more without any visible effort.

The stairwell was quiet around them. The lights flickered off for a moment, plunging them into near-darkness, and then came back.

She was aware of the warmth of him, the solidity of it. The way he moved carefully on the stairs, adjusting his grip once when her bag shifted, without breaking stride.

Something moved in her chest that she didn’t have a name for. She didn’t try to find one.

He carried her out through the lobby. The security guard at the front desk jolted awake in his chair, took one look at them, and said nothing.

Phineas walked to the car at the curb and settled her into the passenger seat with more care than she’d expected – unhurried, deliberate – adjusting her bag on her lap before closing the door with a quiet, precise click.

He didn’t get in immediately.

She watched through the windshield as he stood beside the car, one hand resting on the roof, the city lights catching the line of his jaw. He took out his phone and dialed. When the line connected, his voice dropped low and cold, the warmth of the stairwell already gone from it entirely.

“Pull every frame of security footage from the fifth-floor hallway tonight. I want it all.”

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