Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 245

Chapter 245

Chapter 245

The conference room at Harkindustries had been arranged for forty journalists and over eighty had shown up, bodies pressed along the back wall, ameras stacked three deep on tripods at the rear, every available chair filled and people standing in the aisles despite the fire safety signs nobody was looking at

Lucia sat at the long table with Alexander beside her, a folder of documents in front of each of them, the PR director to her left, lead counsel to Alexander’s right.

She had not slept properly in three nights. Every date checked twice, every document cross-referenced against Claire’s careful construction of lies, and she had woken that morning with her stomach already tight before her eyes were fully open.

The PR director opened with a brief statement.

Then the room exploded.

“Mrs. Kane, did you visit Margaret Hart in prison?”

“Mr. Kane, is it true your legal team threatened the Lowe family?”

“Mrs. Kane, can you confirm the timeline of the asset transfer?”

“Did Margaret feel coerced into giving away the money?”

“Is it true you used your position as a Trillionaire wife to bury this story?”

Hands shot up across the room, journalists half rising from their seats, voices overlapping into a wall of sound that made the moderator’s first attempt to call for order completely useless. Capheras flashed in irregular bursts. Someone near the back shouted a question about Marco’s will that nobody at the table could even properly hear.

“One at a time,” the moderator said, his voice barely cutting through. “One at a time, please.”

It did not work. A second wave of questions came before the first had finished, journalists talking over each other. microphones thrust toward the table from people standing too close, the air thick with bodies and heat and the specific aggressive energy of a room that smelled blood.

“Mrs. Kane!” A woman near the front, her voice sharp and carrying, “The Lowe family claims you manipulated a grieving. isolated prisoner. How do you respond?”

“I visited Margaret Hart once,” Lucia said, her voice raised to be heard over the residual noise. “Week before any transfer occurred. I told her that her husband was dead because of her own actions. That is documented. That is not coercion”

“But you were there,” another voice cut in, male, aggressive. “You went to a vulnerable woman in prison and within weeks she gave away everything to your daughter. Convenient timing, wouldn’t you say?”

“It is not convenient,” Lucia said, he jaw tightening. “It is documented. There is a letter. There is a lawyer. There is a paper. trail spanning weeks between may visit and the transfer, tone of which involved any further contact from ine

“Where is the letter?” someone shouted, “Has it been independently verified?”

“It has,” Alexander said, leaning toward the microphone. By three separate legal parties, none of whom work for either

The questions krpt coming. faster now, journalists no dongen waiting for acknowledgment, simply browng a cusatioU UPO the room and seeing which ones landed

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Chapter 245-

Mr. Kane, did you really file a restraining order against a grieving family?”

“After Margaret’s brother grabbed my thirteen-year-old daughter outside her school,” Alexander said, has wore rang through with an edge that made several reporters pause mid-scribble. There is a police report. There is school security footage. There are eyewitnesses. I will hand every document to anyone in this room willing to verify it before printing another word.”

The room shifted, the energy momentarily disrupted, then surging back as a new voice took over

A man near the middle of the room stood without waiting to be called on, his voice carrying a particular sne confidence that cut through the noise around him.

“Some would say,” he said, “that Monica Hart has shown a pattern of seeking attention since this entire saga began. The courtroom testimony. The art exhibition where a gallery owner just happened to discover her in front of cameras. The very public donation of sixty-four million dollars. Is it possible she simply enjoys being the center of this story?

The room, which had been pure chaos seconds before, went suddenly and completely still.

Lucia felt something cold drop through her chest.

Alexander’s hand, resting on the table, closed slowly into a fist.

“What is your name?” he asked. His voice had not risen but something underneath it had shifted entirely.

“Daniel Ferris. Channel Nine.”

“Do you have a daughter, Mr. Ferris?”

The question landed off-rhythm in the room, strange enough that the chaos around them seemed to pause, journalists looking up from their notepads.

“I… yes,” Ferris said, visibly thrown. “I have a daughter.”

“How old?”

“Eleven.”

Alexander leaned forward, both hands flat on the table now.

nan with

“Imagine your eleven-year-old taken from a shopping center by a woman with a grudge against her family,” he ad

K “Imagine her tied up in a basement for six days. No proper food some of those days. No proper water. A bruise on her face from a grown woman’s hand. Now imagine, on the sixth day, you watch through a doorway as a gun pointed at her, and her father throws himself in front of that gun, and he dies on the floor in front of her, his blood on the concrete, her hand still in his while it happens.”

The room had gone utterly silent, eighty journalists and every camera fixed on the table.

“Imagine she is thirteen years old when this happens,” Alexander continued, his voice steady but carrying something underneath that made it land harder than shouting would have. “Imagine she testines about every dead a courtroo months later because the law required it. Imagine she still wakes some nights screaming because in her nightmares woman who killed her father is holding her underwater.” His eyes did not leave Ferris’s face Imagine the ban SE year in therapy, linagine a doctor has documented lasting physical and psychological damage. Documented Mr. Ferris staged. Not svented for sympathy

Ferris’s face had gone pale, his pen motionless against his notepad

your stand in this room and call your daughter an attention seeker after that?” Alexander waxed Would

2:04 pm PA

Chapter 215-

35. vouchers

her face, that she enjoyed any part of it?”

Nobody in the room moved.

“My daughter did not ask for any of this,” Alexander said. “She did not ask to be photographed. She did not ask for her name in headlines written by people who have never met her. She is a child who survived something most adults in this room could not survive, and you stood here and called her an attention seeker”

Lucia’s composure, which had held through every shouted accusation of the last twenty minutes, finally broke. Her eyes were bright, her throat tight, and she did not try to hide it, sitting in front of eighty journalists and every camera with tears she made no attempt to wipe away.

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