Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 326

Chapter 326

Chapter 326

Lucas was still at his desk when the notifications began.

He hadn’t slept. The archived page with the deleted record was still open in one tab, the error message unchanged for the past three hours. He’d been working through other searches, slower ones, the kind that required navigating databases that didn’t want to be navigated.

His phone buzzed.

A news alert, from a gossip account he followed for background during the investigation. The headline was large enough to read without opening it.

He opened it anyway.

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The article showed a photograph of Alexander entering the Kane building from a week ago. The headline read: Business Billionaire Secretly Impregnates Mistress While Wife Pregnant. Below it sat Ruth’s name, the mansion address, the claim that she’d been staying as a guest of the family, and a timeline that matched what had actually happened almost too precisely.

Lucas set his phone down, then picked it back up.

It buzzed again. Then again. Within seconds the same story was everywhere, different accounts, different photographs, all telling the same version.

He was already at his door by the time it buzzed a fifth time.

The hallway was still dark. He went to Ria’s room first.

She opened the door before he finished knocking, which meant she’d already seen it.

“I know,” she said.

He held up his phone. She looked at it, then at him, something already calculating behind her eyes, three steps into managing the situation.

“How long?” he asked.

“I saw the first post forty minutes ago,” she said. “Small account then. By now it’ll be everywhere.”

She was already on her own phone.

The television in the sitting room was on when Lucas came downstairs, unusual for six in the morning. Alexander stood in front of it, still in yesterday’s clothes, watching a morning programme that had already moved the story into its main segment.

A presenter described the situation in the measured tone morning news used for things it had decided were significant. Behind her a split screen showed Alexander’s company headshot beside a photo of the Kane

mansion.

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Chapter 326

His jaw was set.

Lucas stayed in the doorway and said nothing.

Noise built outside the front of the house, several vehicles arriving, voices, the gate intercom buzzing over and over. Lucas crossed to the window and looked out through the edge of the curtain.

Vans lined the road. Cameras on tripods. People holding microphones.

He counted six vehicles before he stopped counting.

He checked the financial app on his phone, the one he’d installed for the investigation, and watched the number there already sliding in one direction. Investors were reacting fast online, and once the market opened properly, it would likely get worse.

He set the phone face down on the table.

Lucia came downstairs at seven.

She’d already seen it, that much was obvious before she said a word, in the way she moved down the stairs and through the sitting room toward the kitchen without slowing at the television.

She saw the camera vans through the kitchen window.

She stood with both hands flat on the counter.

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A door opened in the corridor. Footsteps. Ruth came into the kitchen in her house clothes, hair down, eyes on her phone, and stopped when she saw Lucia at the counter and Alexander in the sitting room doorway.

She glanced at the television visible through the doorway. Her face arranged itself into the correct shape of

concern.

“I just saw,” she said.

Lucia turned. “You just saw.”

Ruth looked at her.

“Is that all you’re going to say?” Lucia’s voice stayed low and even. “You’ve been in this house two weeks. My husband’s private situation, which very few people outside these walls knew about, is on every news programme this morning.” She held Ruth’s eyes. “Who else did you tell?”

“I haven’t told anyone anything.”

“Then how did they get your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“They have your name,” Lucia said. “A description of this house. A timeline accurate down to the day you arrived.” She took a breath. “That did not come from anyone in this family.”

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Ruth held her gaze. “I did not do this.”

She said it the way she said most things, composed and quiet, everything about her sounding reasonable, her expression that of someone hurt by the accusation.

“I came here because I had nowhere safe to go,” she said. “And now you’re suggesting I’m the reason the press is outside your gate.”

Lucia said nothing back.

Behind her the presenter kept talking. Outside the gate the vans hadn’t moved. The share price had dropped further in the twenty minutes since Lucas last checked.

Lucia turned and walked out of the kitchen.

Ruth stayed where she was.

She set her phone on the counter and looked out at the garden, at the morning light crossing the lawn, at the camera crews visible beyond the gate.

The expression that crossed her face then, alone in the kitchen, Lucia gone, Alexander in the other room, the children still upstairs, nobody watching her for the first time since she’d arrived in this house, was not the one she usually wore at the table or in the sitting room or in hallway conversations.

It lasted only a moment. Gone before any footstep upstairs could have caught it.

But for that instant, in the empty kitchen with the morning light and the vans on the road and the television describing her situation to the whole country, something crossed Ruth Walker’s face that was not concern and was not hurt.

It was the look of a woman watching the first part of a plan begin to work.

Then she picked her phone back up. Put the concerned look back in place. Walked toward the sitting room to join the family in front of the news.

In the hallway, Lucas had been on his way downstairs.

He’d stopped at the kitchen door, where the gap in the frame had never fully closed. He’d seen her face in the moment before she rebuilt it.

He stood there a long moment.

Then he went back upstairs without anyone seeing him, sat at his desk, and opened his laptop, the crashed archive page still glowing on the screen.

He thought about what he’d just watched happen in that kitchen.

He’d been almost certain before.

He was certain now.

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He opened a new tab and started searching again.

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11:01 Wed, Jul 29