Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 329

11:01 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 328

The driver studied him another second, then pulled into traffic.

AG 60 ร

The business district was twenty minutes away, glass towers, uniformed lobby security, cars worth more than most people made in a year. He’d been in places like this with Alexander or with his mother, but never alone on foot, never feeling this particular mix of exhausted and sharp that comes when a body runs past the edge of its sleep.

He paid the driver and followed Ruth on foot, staying behind cars, behind pillars.

She walked into an exclusive private club like someone who had done it a hundred times.

He took up a spot behind a concrete pillar near the entrance and waited.

The black car arrived seven minutes later. Two men climbed out first, security, moving with the automatic scanning habit of people trained to notice threats. He went very still behind the pillar.

Then the third man stepped out.

His attention landed on the back of the man. Tall. Broad through the shoulders. A grey suit worn well, the ease of someone comfortable in expensive rooms for a long time.

The man turned to say something to a guard.

His face came into view.

The camera nearly slipped from Lucas’s hands. He caught it against his chest.

He stood there staring at a stranger and felt something land in his chest with no name yet, close to the feeling of seeing a ghost, not quite fear, not quite disbelief, something built from both at once.

The man had Marco’s eyes. The same shape, the same set in the face. The jaw matched too specifically for coincidence. The posture carried the kind of familiarity that only comes from inheritance rather than habit. Older than Marco had been, more lines, a different weight to him, but the resemblance hit his stomach before it reached his brain.

He raised the camera.

Click.

Ruth crossed toward the man, her face doing something Lucas had never once seen since she’d arrived in their house, not the composed pleasant mask she wore for the family and the cameras outside the gate. The real one. The same one she’d shown a photograph at two in the morning.

The man opened his arms. They embraced briefly, the greeting of people who knew each other well.

Click.

Lucas eased along the pillar. Their words arrived in pieces, shapes without content, and he shifted another half step closer.

“They’re getting suspicious,” Ruth said, her voice carrying further than she meant it to.

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He reached into the briefcase his guard was holding and drew out an envelope, thick, weighted.

Ruth took it without pause.

Click.

Lucas leaned in one more inch, wanting a clearer angle on the handoff, the envelope passing between them in full morning light. One more, he thought, and lifted the camera again.

His shoe came down on a patch of dead leaves.

Crunch.

The sound was small. Barely anything against the pavement. It should have vanished into the morning noise.

One of the guards turned.

“There.”

Not a question.

Lucas was already moving.

He cut around a long saloon parked at the curb and kept going, because stopping wasn’t an option. Footsteps followed, two sets, quick and certain, the pace of people trained for exactly this and not tired and not sixteen.

He turned left, nearly collided with a businessman coming the other way, sidestepped, kept running. He ducked into the first narrow gap between buildings he found, a service passage, bins on one side, a locked door on the other. The footsteps kept coming.

A hand caught the back of his hoodie, fabric pulling, stretching, tearing at the seam, and he was through the grip and stumbling forward, catching himself on both palms against the ground.

He was up and over the low wall at the end of the passage before the guard recovered.

He kept running two more streets before he slowed enough to think.

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Chapter 328

He found a delivery truck outside a loading bay and pressed his back against it, breathing the way you breathe when your lungs want more than you’re giving them.

He waited.

Nothing. No footsteps.

He checked his phone. The photographs were there, the envelope, the handoff, the man’s profile clear enough to work with.

He set the man’s face against the memory of the printout waiting on his desk at home.

His hands weren’t steady.

He didn’t look at the images again until he was in another taxi heading back.

He looked three times.

The resemblance didn’t fade with any of them.

His mother was in the hallway when he came through the door. Her expression was the one she wore when she’d already decided something was wrong and was working out how wrong.

She crossed to him and pressed her palm flat against the side of his face, the same check she’d used when he was small and she wanted to assess something without asking outright.

“Lucas.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

Her eyes moved to his hoodie, the torn seam, then to his palms, the raw marks from the pavement.

“What happened to you?”

“I tripped. I went for a walk. I tripped.”

She wasn’t convinced. He watched her deciding whether to push.

He got in first. “Mum. Did Dad ever have a brother?”

She went still. “A brother?”

“Marco,” he said. “Did he ever mention one? Did your father in law ever talk about another son?”

She thought about it, and he watched her go back through a marriage and a divorce and every year around both.

“No. Never. Marco never spoke of a sibling, and his parents only had him, as far as I ever knew.”

Her eyes stayed on his face. “Why are you asking?”

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11:01 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 328

“It was nothing. I saw someone today who looked like him. On the street. It just caught me.”

She watched him climb the stairs. He heard her still standing in the hallway after he turned the corner.

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He locked his bedroom door, sat on the bed, and pulled up the clearest photo of the man’s face, enlarging it until it filled the screen.

He sat with it a long time.

“Who are you,” he said quietly, to the image, to the face wearing Marco’s eyes in someone else’s face. “Marcus.”

The name had reached him on the taxi ride home, a single word one of the guards had used at the car, caught from behind the pillar.

“Why do you look like my father?”

Outside his window, a black luxury car moved slowly down the road in front of the Kane mansion, its pace just short of stopping, then continued on.

Lucas stayed with the photograph.

He never noticed the car at all.

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11:01 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 329

Chapter 329

79

# 55 vouchers

The newspapers were from three different publishers and they all said the same thing.

Alexander had read them once, quickly, taking in the shape of the coverage rather than the sentences themselves, then folded them in half and pushed them to the far side of the desk where he wouldn’t have to see them while he thought.

He’d been in his home office since six that morning.

The house was awake around him. He could hear it, the kitchen, the corridor, Lucia somewhere upstairs. He hadn’t joined any of it.

He reached for his phone.

He’d been putting off this call for three days, waiting for things to resolve on their own, for the evidence to crack or for Ruth to say something that gave them an opening. Three days had produced nothing but a story spreading further each morning and shares down another two points at yesterday’s close.

He called the investigation firm.

He’d retained them for corporate security work for six years. The head of it, a man named Garrett, had the particular quality of someone who moved quietly through information and left little trace of having been there.

Garrett answered on the second ring.

“I have a situation,” Alexander said. “Someone built a campaign against me. I don’t know who yet. I want everything. Not theories. Facts.”

“Understood.”

“If this was planned, there’s a trail. There’s always a trail. I want it followed to the end.”

“We’ll start now.”

Alexander glanced at the folded papers on the far side of the desk. “They made a mistake,” he said. “Whatever they thought they were dealing with, they underestimated how far I’ll go for my family.”

The call ended. He sat back.

Waiting was the part he handled worst.

For three days the firm worked without visible progress, which didn’t mean there was none, only that Garrett spoke only when he had something worth saying. Alexander went through the motions of the household, sat at meals, took his board’s calls, showed up where he had to show up.

He kept circling the same details. Ruth knowing his Zurich schedule. The photographs with a shadow angled wrong for the timestamp, which his assistant had flagged. Money spent on evidence almost too convincing to question.

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Chapter 329

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On the fourth morning Garrett called and said he was coming in person, which meant what it always meant.

He arrived with two associates and four thick folders, laid them on the desk, and opened the first without sitting.

“Every document used against you is manufactured,” he said.

“Show me.”

Garrett slid two pages side by side. One a genuine lab record from the clinic that confirmed Ruth’s pregnancy. The other the record Alexander had been given, his name on it.

He put a finger on each. “Different paper stock. Different printer resolution. The ink is slightly off on the second. A forensics team would tell you in twenty minutes which one came from a lab and which came from a very expensive setup somewhere else.”

“How good is that setup?”

“Good enough to pass most labs without question. We only caught it because we were specifically looking.”

“So all of it,” Alexander said. “The hotel records. The photographs. The paperwork.”

“Every document tying you to Ruth Walker the way it’s being claimed. Made. Not real.”

The second file was financial.

“We traced the money,” Garrett said.

“To who?”

“Not a person. Nine shell companies across four countries. Layered accounts built to hide movement.”

“How much?”

Garrett turned to the highlighted page. The number at the bottom sat in the millions.

Alexander looked at it a long moment. Someone had spent millions to do this to him.

“This wasn’t emotional,” he said. “This was planned.”

“For a while,” Garrett said. “The earliest digital trace goes back months. Some groundwork further than that.”

He opened the third file. The shell companies, traced far enough back, all ran through one account. Inactive for years. He slid the documentation across.

Alexander read it. Read it again.

The account belonged to a holding company that had contracted for Hart Industries for six years before

Marco’s death.

The room went quiet in a particular way.

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Chapter 329

“My wife ex husband has been dead a while,” Alexander said, careful with it.

“We know. The account went inactive before he died. But whoever’s behind this had access to financial infrastructure running through his old business.” Garrett paused. “They were inside his history. Channels he built that nobody closed after he died, because nobody knew to look.”

Someone had been living inside Marco Hart’s past. Waiting.

“Can you identify who?” Alexander asked.

Garrett hesitated, and the hesitation from a man who rarely hesitated said something on its own.

“Not completely. Not yet.” He reached for the fourth folder. “But we found something I wanted to verify before bringing it to you.”

He opened it. Old employee records, a printed list, most names in the unremarkable font of software nobody used anymore.

One name was circled in pencil.

Ruth Walker.

“She worked directly for Marco Hart,” Garrett said. “Several years. Senior assistant. Access to his calendar, his correspondence, his travel, his financial authorizations.”

Alexander’s mind went to Ruth’s face over the photograph in her room, the real version of her expression, the one nobody was meant to see.

“How long did she work for him?”

“Two years in the records we found. Possibly longer. Some earlier records don’t exist anymore.”

“When did she leave?”

“The same year Marco married Mrs. Kane.”

The office held its quiet.

Alexander stood and crossed to the window. The city below kept its ordinary pace, indifferent to whatever was happening in this particular room above it.

He turned back. “Don’t tell anyone. Not my team. Not my board. Not my wife.”

Garrett’s face showed the closest thing to surprise he allowed himself. “Not Mrs. Kane?”

“Not yet. Not until we know the full shape of it. If Ruth Walker is part of this the way it’s starting to look, I need the whole picture before I bring it to Lucia. She’s pregnant. She’s already been through enough.” His eyes stayed on the folder with Ruth’s name. “I need the rest first.”

Garrett began gathering the files. At the door he stopped.

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11:01 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 329

“One more thing.”

…

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He drew a photograph from the outer pocket of his folder and set it on the edge of the desk.

Old. The warm color of film rather than digital, grain visible at this size. A company event, formally dressed guests at some kind of reception.

Marco stood near the center, younger, before the years that followed had left their weight on him.

Several feet behind his left shoulder stood Ruth, younger, different hair, still recognizable.

Beside Marco, half hidden by another guest who had moved at the moment of the shot, stood a man.

The guest covered most of his face. One side remained visible. Just enough.

Alexander picked up the photograph and studied the visible half, the eye, the jaw, the angle the obstruction. hadn’t managed to hide.

“Who are you,” he said quietly, to a fraction of a face nearly forty three years old.

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