Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 330

ـالNo Ads

Chapter 330

Chapter 330

The photographs were on the bed in front of Lucas when Monica knocked.

He hadn’t called for her. Hadn’t texted. She knocked the way she knocked when she already knew something was wrong and had been standing in the corridor deciding whether to come in, and her face when he opened the door showed she’d made the decision.

She came in, closed the door quietly, and looked at the photographs arranged on the duvet.

Lucas sat on the edge of the bed and told her everything. Following Ruth that morning. The taxi. The business district. The man who stepped out of the black car. The resemblance. He showed her the photographs, the man’s profile and jaw and eye, the envelope changing hands, Ruth’s face wearing the expression she never showed the family.

Monica stayed quiet while he talked, her attention moving between the photographs and his face, holding several things at once until she understood how they fit together.

When he finished, her eyes drifted toward the wall separating this room from the east wing.

“Does she know who he is?”

“She knows everything about him,” Lucas said. “She knew his name before the guards said it. She walked toward him before he was out of the car.”

Monica’s gaze dropped to the floor for a moment.

“We’ve been searching the wrong place,” she said.

He waited.

“Everything we’ve found is online,” she said. “Archived sites. Deleted records. The trail he leaves whenever he moves.” She looked up. “But she’s been living in this house for two weeks. Whatever she brought with her is three doors down.”

He understood before she finished.

His eyes moved to the closed door.

“If we’re wrong,” Monica said, “we leave without touching anything and nobody knows we were there.” She held his gaze. “But I don’t think we’re wrong.”

The hallway at that hour carried the quiet feeling of a house at night, every sound traveling further than it would in daylight, their own breathing louder than it should have been. Lucas moved in his socks. Monica was already in hers.

They stopped outside Ruth’s door.

Lucas tried the handle. Locked.

1/5

Chapter 330

Monica reached up and pulled a thin metal pin from her hair. He looked at it, then at her.

She gave him a look that meant don’t ask.

55 you

She worked the lock for what felt longer than two minutes, resetting her position twice. On the third try, a soft click, barely audible, and the handle gave.

Both of them went still. No sound from inside. No sound from the corridor.

Lucas eased the door open.

The room sat dim, curtains blocking most of the streetlight, and it took his eyes a moment to sort the shapes in it. Ruth’s bed was made with the same precision she brought to everything, corners tight, pillow centered. The dressing table was organized. The books on the nightstand stood stacked by size.

Too neat.

Not the neatness of someone who’d settled into a space over two weeks. The neatness of someone maintaining a surface the whole time.

One suitcase on the rack near the wardrobe sat closed and latched. A second, smaller bag was closed too. The third was different.

Monica saw it first, sitting beside the wardrobe instead of on the rack, its latch fitted with a combination lock instead of the standard clasp on the others.

Lucas knelt beside it.

The combination took four tries, worked through methodically, birth year logic first, then the company founding year from the archived records. On the fourth attempt the latch released.

Inside: clothes, toiletries, books. Everything that should be there. He sat back on his heels.

Monica lifted it all out in careful stacks.

The base was fabric lined, dark grey like the inside walls. She pressed her palm flat against it and the sound that came back was wrong.

She looked over at him.

He pressed his own palm to the same spot.

Hollow.

He ran his fingers along the seam where the base met the side until he found the edge that wasn’t quite flush, and lifted it.

The hidden compartment wasn’t large. Exactly large enough for what it held.

Five passports, different colors, different countries. He picked up the first. The photograph inside showed Ruth the way photographs capture people trying to look like nobody, neutral expression, neutral clothes. The

215

Chapter 330

name wasn’t Ruth Walker.

He opened the second. Different name.

Third. Fourth. Fifth.

He closed the last one slowly.

Neither of them spoke.

Five passports. Five names. Five different lives.

“Who is she?” Monica finally whispered.

Lucas set the passports beside him and reached for the envelopes underneath.

The first had no label. Inside, photographs of their father, and looking at them gave him the same feeling he’d had watching Ruth hold her own photograph two nights ago, the strange wrongness of someone’s face appearing in a place it had no business being.

Their father at company events. Crossing a parking garage. At a restaurant, shot through glass from the street. Holding their mother’s hand outside what looked like a hospital, both of them younger, taken from far enough away that neither had known they were being watched.

Some photos were clearly recent. Some carried the warm grain of film from decades back.

Monica went very still beside him.

“She followed him,” she said.

“For most of his adult life.”

He laid those photographs on the duvet and picked up the second envelope. The label held a single word.

Lucia.

He opened it.

More photographs than he’d expected spilled out across the bed, and he and Monica stood in the dim room looking at twenty years of their mother documented from outside her own life. Their mum in university clothes in front of a building he didn’t recognize. Their mum at what looked like her engagement. Their mum heavily pregnant, entering a clinic. Their mum with a newborn, leaving a hospital. Their mum outside a courthouse during the divorce. Their mum outside Hart Industries during the early months of rebuilding it. Their mum with Alexander at a public event, shot from far enough away they never knew they’d been caught in anyone’s lens.

Their mum with all four of them in the garden of the Kane estate, the angle showing whoever held the camera had stood outside the wall.

Monica’s hands lowered the photographs slowly. She said nothing.

2/5

Chapter 330

Lucas found the newspaper clippings underneath, not loose but sealed in plastic sleeves, sorted by date, each margin marked in small careful handwriting. Every article touching their mother across two decades. The divorce. His father’s death. The court hearings. The Hart Industries acquisition. The award. The twins

announcement.

All of it, organized with the patience of someone building a case.

He set them aside and reached the bottom of the compartment, where a diary waited, leather cover worn soft at the corners, old enough that he could feel the weight of it and the old smell of the paper before he even opened it.

He handed it to Monica.

She opened to the first page. Two lines, written in dark ink, in a controlled hand that had clearly thought over every word before setting it down.

Lucia Kane stole my future.

I will take hers.

Neither of them spoke.

The room felt different than it had sixty seconds ago. The same curtains, the same neat bed, the same organized books, but none of it meant what it had a minute before.

Lucas sat down on the floor, his back against the locked suitcase, looking at the passports and the photographs and the clippings spread across the duvet and the diary still open in Monica’s hands, everything that had been separate suspicious pieces for weeks now arranging itself into one shape.

“It was never about Dad,” he said, barely any sound behind it.

Monica closed the diary. Her gaze moved to the door, then through it toward the bedroom down the hall where their mother slept, three floors above a suitcase that had sat under her roof for two weeks holding twenty years of surveillance inside it.

“She didn’t come here for Dad,” Monica said, the words arriving one at a time. “She came here for Mum.”

The room went completely silent.

Neither of them heard the soft sound outside the door.

Neither of them heard the footsteps that had stopped in the corridor and now stood on the other side, perfectly still.

Someone was outside.

Listening.