Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 335

Chapter 335

Chapter 335

The alert came at 6:47 in the evening.

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Lucas had set the tracking app to buzz with a sound quiet enough not to carry through the walls. He was at his desk when his phone buzzed, and the small blue dot that had been sitting in the same spot at the Kane mansion for three days had started moving.

He sent one message to the group.

She’s leaving.

Ria was in his room in four minutes. Monica two minutes after that. Lena last, pulling her jacket on as she walked in.

Lucas had the tracker open. “Industrial district. She’s heading toward the river.”

“Marcus,” Monica said.

“We’re going,” Ria said.

Lena looked at the door, then at Lucas. “We should tell Mum and Dad.”

“Not yet,” Lucas said. “We need to see who Marcus really is. On camera. Something nobody can deny.”

Ria already had her car keys in hand.

They were downstairs and out the side door in under three minutes, moving fast and quiet, the way four people move when they’ve spent weeks learning how to walk through this house without making a sound.

Ria kept several cars between them and Ruth’s taxi, driving at normal traffic speed instead of anything that looked like a chase. Lucas watched the tracker. Monica watched the taxi three cars up front. Lena kept her eyes on the road behind them.

“She’s checking her mirrors,” Monica said.

“She’s been suspicious of us since we confronted her.”

“That’s actually good,” Ria said.

“No,” Lucas said. Everyone turned to look at him. “Worried people make mistakes. She thinks we’re still back at the house. She has no idea we’re right behind her.”

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Chapter 335

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Ria pulled in behind a row of shipping containers next to the building beside it, far enough away that their car wouldn’t be spotted right away.

They walked the rest of the way along the containers. Lucas already had his phone recording.

They found a gap between two containers with a clear view of the front of the building, where Ruth stood talking to one of the guards. Forty meters away. Close enough to zoom in, far enough to stay hidden as long as they didn’t move.

The door opened. Marcus walked out.

Lucas pressed himself against the container and held the phone steady.

He looked just like he had in the photo Lucas had taken outside the business club, the grey suit even darker tonight, almost black in the low light, moving like someone who was used to big spaces and had nothing to worry about. He stopped next to Ruth and the guard stepped back.

There was quiet anger on his face. “The children have become a problem.”

Ruth dropped her head a little. “I underestimated them.”

Marcus looked toward the river for a moment. “You should never underestimate family.”

Monica had her own phone out beside Lucas, getting a slightly different angle. Ria held hers at waist height, catching the wider view. Lena kept watching the guards.

“Everything is falling apart,” Ruth said.

Marcus shook his head just slightly. “No. Everything is only just starting.”

His voice carried the way voices do outside in quiet places, nothing around to soften the sound bouncing off

the concrete.

“Lucia Kane destroyed my brother.”

All four of them froze.

Lucas’s grip tightened on the phone.

“Marco should still be alive,” Marcus said, flat and controlled. “I should still have my brother.” He turned slightly. “Instead I buried my twin.”

The phone nearly slipped out of Lucas’s hand. He caught it and didn’t move anything else.

Their father had a twin. A twin who never showed up at the funeral. A twin nobody had ever once mentioned. A twin standing forty meters away right now, planning to tear apart everything their father had left behind.

Lucas could only take it in piece by piece, too much to hold all at once.

Next to him, Ria had her back flat against the container, staring at the metal wall instead of at Marcus, her jaw moving with no sound coming out. Ria, who could handle anything hard with the calm she’d spent her whole

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Chapter 335

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life building, couldn’t manage anything at all for about four seconds.

Monica had both hands pressed over her mouth, staring at Marcus with the exact look of someone seeing her own father’s face on a stranger, because that was exactly what she was looking at, Marco’s eyes, Marco’s jaw, the way a man carries himself when he grew up right beside him.

Lena touched Lucas’s arm and didn’t say anything, understanding that this moment belonged to the three of them, to Marco’s kids, and that her only job right now was to stand there beside them while they held it.

“He had a brother,” Monica whispered. “He had a twin and never told us.”

“He never told Mum either,” Ria said, her voice thinner than usual, still putting itself back together. “She would have said something.”

Lucas kept recording. His hands weren’t steady, but the shot stayed on Marcus, and that was all that mattered right now. He would fall apart later.

Marcus kept talking.

“Marco spent his whole life choosing Lucia. Every choice. Every path. And when she came back into his life, everything after that destroyed him.” His jaw tightened. “If she had just stayed gone, my brother would still be alive. She came back and set off everything that killed him. Margaret. The basement. All of it.”

Ruth nodded. She believed every word of it. That much was obvious even from forty meters away.

“What about Margaret?” she asked.

Marcus barely moved his head. “She’s dying. She already failed at what she was supposed to do. She has nothing left to offer. She doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Then what’s next?”

He glanced at the warehouse, then back at the river. “Everything Lucia built. Everything she loves. Everything she thinks is safe. It’s all going to disappear.” A pause. “She took my brother’s life from him. She’s not taking anything else from this family.”

Lena leaned in a little closer to hear, her hand still resting steady on Lucas’s shoulder.

“And the children?” Ruth asked quietly.

Marcus turned and looked straight at her.

“No.”

The word came out harder than anything he’d said before.

“They’re Marco’s children. They’re innocent. They don’t pay for what their mother did.”

Ria’s eyes met Lucas’s, something in her face that didn’t match the man she’d been expecting.

“He means it,” she breathed.

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Chapter 335

“He’s keeping us out of this,” Monica said.

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They’d been hiding there for fourteen minutes when a gust of wind came off the river, sweeping across the concrete and catching the windshield of Ria’s car parked way down the road. It flashed with the last bit of evening light, quick but clear.

Ruth turned.

She stared at the car with the sharp attention of someone who had been watching everything around her for weeks and never stopped.

Marcus noticed her staring. “What is it?”

“Someone followed me,” Ruth said.

Lucas pressed flat against the container. Nobody breathed.

Marcus turned slowly to look down the road, staring at Ria’s car for a long moment.

Then something crossed his face that wasn’t the quiet anger from earlier or the cold certainty from the middle of the talk.

He smiled.

“Leave,” he told Ruth. “Now. I’ll take care of this.”

Lucas looked at Monica. Monica looked at Ria.

Ria was already moving toward the car, staying low, keeping the containers between them and Marcus’s sightline. They reached it fast and quiet, climbed in, and Ria started the engine without turning on the headlights, driving slowly along the edge of the road until they reached the turn, then switching the lights on and easing into normal speed heading back into the city.

Lucas looked down at his phone.

Fourteen minutes of video. Both faces clear for most of it. Every word caught.

Back at the warehouse, Marcus watched the taillights disappear around the corner. A guard came to stand beside him.

“Do we go after them?”

Marcus kept his eyes on the empty road. “No.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a photograph, a recent one, the kind taken from far away by someone with a camera and patience and a clear view into the Kane estate gardens. Lucia in the middle. Alexander beside her. The four kids around them. A family caught in a normal moment they hadn’t known was being

watched.

His thumb moved slowly across Lucia’s face.

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Chapter 335

He slid the photo back into his coat.

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“The real game starts now,” he said, to nobody, to the empty road, to the closed pocket over his own chest.

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