Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 234

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Chapter 234

Chapter 234

The office door closed behind them and Lucia started moving before she had decided to.

Back and forth across the carpet between the desk and the window, her arms crossed tight over her chest, her heels clicking against the hardwood border where the carpet ended. Alexander sat on the edge of the desk and watched her cross the same six feet of floor for the fourth time.

“You’re going to wear a path into the floor,” he said.

“I can’t sit down.”

“You’re making me dizzy.”

“Then look somewhere else.” She turned at the window and crossed back toward the desk. “I can’t sit down, Alexander. I can’t just sit in a chair right now like nothing happened.”

He let her finish another lap before he spoke again.

“What’s actually happening in your head right now?” he asked. His voice had dropped the careful authority he had used downstairs in the lobby. This was just him now, watching his wife wear a track across the carpet, trying to find the door into whatever she was carrying.

Lucia stopped at the window. She looked out at the city, the grey afternoon light flat across the buildings, the same view that had been there since this office belonged to Marco.

“They are not going to stop,” she said. “I could see it in their faces. Marie. Claire. The way they looked at me.” She wrapped her arms tighter around herself. “These are not people who walk away because the law tells them they have to. These are people who break things when they don’t get what they want.”

“I know.”

“I’m scared.” The word came out smaller than she meant it to, smaller than the boardroom voice she used downstairs, smaller than the woman who had just threatened a family of four with legal annihilation in her own lobby. “I’m scared of what they might do. Not to me. I can survive whatever they throw at me. I’m scared of what they might do to the kids.”

Alexander was quiet for a moment.

“Monica specifically,” Lucia said. “She’s the one who has the money. She’s the one Claire was talking about like she was something to be punished. If they can’t get to me, if they can’t get the money back through any court, what stops someone like Claire from deciding to go around all of that and just go straight to her?”

“Nothing has happened to her,” Alexander said carefully. “Nothing is going to happen to her.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that I will not allow it,” Alexander said. His voice had gone low and absolutely certain, the same voice he had used in the lobby when he told the security guards to move. “I have already failed once to keep your children safe from something that came at them through the people connected to Marco. I am not failing

again.”

Lucia turned from the window to look at him.

“That wasn’t your failure,” she said. “What happened to Monica and Lena wasn’t anyone’s failure except Margaret’s.”

“I know the facts,” Alexander said. “I know who pulled the trigger and who planned the kidnapping. That doesn’ t change what it felt like to stand outside that warehouse not knowing if I would get them back.” His jaw was tight. “So when I tell you I am not letting it happen again, that is not a promise made lightly. That is the only thing I am thinking about right now.”

Lucia crossed the room and sat on the edge of the desk beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched.

“Legally,” Alexander said after a moment,

sfer to Monica was clean. There was no

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Chapter 234

coercion, no fraud, nothing that any court will look at twice. Margaret was of sound mind when she made the decision, she went through a lawyer, and the documentation is airtight. Stella was right when she told them that, apparently, before they decided to come here anyway.”

“Then why does it feel like this isn’t over?”

“Because legal reality and what people are willing to do are not the same thing,” Alexander said. “Claire didn’t come here for a legal argument. She came here to frighten you. To make you feel like giving something back out of fear was easier than fighting.” He looked at her steadily. “It is not going to be easier. We fight whatever

comes.”

Lucia nodded slowly, though the knot in her chest had not loosened.

“We should tell the children,” Alexander said. “Tonight.”

“No.” Lucia said it fast, the word arriving before she had fully thought it through, and then she sat with it for a second and found she still meant it. “Not yet.”

“Lucia-”

“They came home a month ago,” she said. “A month, Alexander. Monica still has nightmares some nights. Lucas still won’t talk about the funeral directly. Ria still flinches sometimes when a door closes too hard. Lena still walks on egg shell and she has refused to go to the mall, she always reacts to noise. They are not finished healing from the last threat. I am not putting another one in front of them before they’ve had a chance to feel safe again.”

“They deserve to know if there’s a risk to them.”

“There isn’t a risk right now,” Lucia said, more to convince herself than him. “Right now it’s a family making noise in a lobby. If that changes, if it becomes something real and immediate, then yes, we tell them everything. But I will not hand my children another reason to lie awake at night over something that might not even come to anything.”

Alexander studied her for a long moment.

“You’re protecting them the way you always do,” he said. “By carrying it yourself first.”

“Someone has to.”

“You don’t have to carry it alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Lucia said, and for the first time since they had stepped out of that elevator into the lobby, something in her voice softened. “You’re standing right here.”

Alexander put his arm around her shoulders and she let herself lean into him, the tension in her body finally beginning to release in small increments, though not entirely, not completely, not in any way that felt finished. “I will protect them,” Alexander said. “Whatever this family decides to do. Whatever it costs. I promise you that.” Lucia closed her eyes and let the words settle somewhere she could hold onto them. Outside the window the afternoon was sliding toward evening, the grey light deepening at the edges, the city continuing its ordinary rhythm completely unaware of what had happened in the lobby thirty-two floors below. Lucia thought about Monica at home right now, probably in her studio with paint on her fingers, completely unaware that a family she had never met had stood in her mother’s workplace and called her something cruel. She thought about how long that innocence might last.

She did not know the answer.

She only knew that for tonight, at least, she was going to let her daughter keep it.

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