Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 320

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Chapter 320

Chapter 320

By the third day, Ruth Walker had learned where everything lived.

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She knew which cupboard held the good coffee and which held the everyday kind. She knew Lena liked her tea with too much honey, and that Lucas skipped breakfast most mornings unless someone put a plate directly in front of him. She knew the names of two housekeepers and used them every time she passed, warm and easy, like she’d known them for years instead of days.

“Thank you, Delia,” she said one morning, taking a folded towel from the younger housekeeper’s hands. “You didn’t have to bring this up yourself.”

Delia smiled the way people smile when they’re not used to being thanked. “It’s no trouble, Miss Walker.”

“Ruth. Please.”

Ria watched this from the top of the stairs, arms crossed, jaw tight enough to ache.

She’d been watching it for three days now. The way Ruth folded herself into this house like she’d been carved a space in it years ago and was only now moving in. The way the staff smiled when her name came up. The way one of the younger maids had said, just that morning, in a voice that wasn’t trying to be unkind but managed to sting anyway, “She’s just so sweet, isn’t she? Not what I expected at all.”

Ria said nothing in the moment. She walked past with her coffee and let the words sit in her chest like a stone she hadn’t asked to swallow.

She found the same maid later, near the linen closet, and this time she didn’t walk past.

“Don’t talk about her like that in this house,” Ria said. Quiet. Controlled. The kind of quiet that was worse than shouting.

The maid blinked. “I only meant”

“I know what you meant.” Ria’s voice stayed level, but something underneath it hadn’t. “You don’t know what she is. None of us know what she is. So keep the compliments to yourself until we do.”

Lena appeared from the stairwell, drawn by the tension the way she was always drawn to tension, arms folding to match her sister’s. “She’s not a guest. She’s a question mark with a room key.”

The maid’s face went pale. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think

“Don’t do it again,” Ria said, enough weight in it that the maid nodded fast and disappeared down the hall like she had somewhere urgent to be.

Ria pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead once they were alone.

“I could get half this staff fired by Friday if they keep this up.”

“Do it,” Lena said. “Tll help you write the list.”

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10:55 Sat, Jul 25

Chapter 320

Neither of them was joking, not entirely.

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Downstairs, in the room that used to be Alexander’s study before it quietly became something closer to a hiding place, Lucía sat with a folder open in front of her that she wasn’t reading. She’d been not reading in for twenty minutes.

Her mind kept sliding back to that morning, to the moment she’d passed Alexander’s old room, the one he’d started sleeping in four nights ago without either of them saying a word about it. The door had been shut. It was always shut now. She used to be able to read the shape of a whole day just by whether that door sat open or closed, and now it never opened at all, not for her.

She hadn’t asked him to move rooms. He’d simply done it, the night after Ruth’s things were carried up the stairs, as if putting distance between himself and his own wife was the only place left for him to set down whatever he was carrying.

Lucia understood it, in the cold, analytical part of her mind that never fully switched off. He didn’t want to lie beside her every night wondering if she believed him a little less with each hour Ruth stayed under their roof. He didn’t want to watch her watching him.

Understanding it didn’t make it hurt less.

She touched her stomach without meaning to, the way she did more often now, an anchor she reached for whenever the room felt like it was floating away from her.

A knock came at the door, soft, familiar in its rhythm.

“Come in,” she said, though her voice came out thinner than she meant it to.

Alexander stood in the doorway. He didn’t come in.

For a second neither of them spoke, and the silence between them had a texture it never used to have, something with edges.

“You’re avoiding me,” Lucia said. Not an accusation. Just the fact of it, laid flat between them.

“I’m not avoiding you.” His jaw worked. “I’m trying to give you room to think without my face in the middle of it.”

“That’s the same thing.”

He didn’t argue.

“I can’t sleep in that bed with you looking at me like you’re still deciding something,” he said finally, the honesty of it cracking his voice in a way he clearly hadn’t planned. “Every night I feel you not sleeping beside me. Turning it over. And I don’t know how to fix a thing I didn’t do

“I never said you did it.”

“You didn’t have to say it. His eyes were dark, tired in a way sleep wouldn’t fix. “I can feel the question sitting in the room every time we’re in it together.”

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10:55 Sat, Jul 25

Chapter 320

Lucia stood, the folder sliding off her lap, and didn’t reach for it.

“I told her to stay,” she said. “Not because I think she’s telling the truth. Because I need to know who sent her, and I can’t find that out if she’s somewhere I can’t see her.” Her voice cracked once before she caught it. “That was never about doubting you. That was about protecting this family from whoever built this.”

“Then why does it feel like you’re pulling away from me?”

She didn’t have an answer that would survive being said out loud.

For a long moment neither of them moved. He wanted to cross the distance between them. She could see it in his eyes, could feel her own wanting it too, and still neither of them took the first step.

“I’ll prove it,” he said quietly.

She looked at him.

“I don’t know how yet,” he admitted. “But I will. Whoever sent her, whatever this is, I’ll find the truth.”

“I know,” Lucia said, barely above a whisper.

Alexander nodded once, turned, and walked away.

Lucia stayed where she was, listening to his footsteps fade down the hallway until the house went quiet again. She closed her eyes, and for the first time since Ruth had arrived, she let herself cry. Not loudly. Just a few tears slipping down while both hands rested over her stomach.

“Please,” she whispered to the babies growing inside her. “Don’t let this family fall apart again.”

At the other end of the hallway, behind the guest room door, Ruth Walker stood perfectly still.

The smile she’d worn downstairs was gone.

She knelt beside her suitcase and unzipped a hidden compartment beneath the lining. Inside sat a second phone, one no one in the Kane house knew existed. She switched it on.

A message was already waiting.

“Unknown: Report.”

She stared at the screen a moment before her fingers began to move.

*Ruth: They’re exactly where you said they’d be.

She paused, then added one more line.

“The distance between them is growing every day.”

The reply came almost instantly.

*Good. Keep Alexander and Lucia apart. Everything else will follow.”

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10:55 Sat, Jul 25

Chapter 320

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ther’s

Ruth read it twice. A slow smile spread across her face. She deleted the conversation, switched the phone off, and slid it back beneath the lining of the suitcase.

Then she lay back on the bed, one hand resting gently over her stomach, and closed her eyes.

Ruth Walker had entered the Kane house.

But the real enemy had never intended to enter through the front door.

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