Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 339

The notification came at 4:47 in the afternoon.

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Monica looked at the tracker app. The blue dot that had been stationary in the Kane mansion for hours was moving now. Moving fast. Already two streets away.

She went to her door.

The hallway was quiet.

She thought about finding Lucas, but he was in the east wing, and by the time she explained and they got organized, Ruth would be somewhere they couldn’t easily follow. The decision formed in about fifteen seconds, not really enough time to make it properly.

She typed a message.

Ruth just left. I’m following her. Don’t tell Mum and Dad yet.

She sent it, went down through the kitchen, and out the side entrance onto the service road, the one the cameras didn’t fully cover.

Lucas felt his phone buzz from across the room. He read Monica’s message and the words rearranged into something that made his stomach drop.

He called her. One ring. Two. Three. Voicemail.

He called again. Same result.

He was already grabbing his jacket before the second call finished ringing out.

She had gone alone. Monica, fourteen years old, following a woman who had been in contact with armed guards and a man who hadn’t yet shown them the full extent of what he could do, and she’d done it alone because she thought she could get there before him.

He went through the front door at a half run.

Across the road, on the far side of the hedge, a black SUV with tinted windows had been parked at the kerb for forty minutes without moving. Engine off. The driver wore gloves despite the mild afternoon.

A message reached the driver’s phone.

Target leaving the house.

The engine started.

Lucas reached the gate. He pulled up Monica’s live location on his phone. She was already far ahead, the dot moving northeast, and he turned that way, looking for anything to flag down.

The road sat quiet.

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Chapter 339

He stepped off the pavement to see further in both directions.

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He heard it before he saw it, an engine accelerating at a speed that didn’t belong on this road, and he turned.

The black SUV was sixty meters away and closing fast.

He stepped back toward the pavement. The vehicle adjusted toward him. Not toward the center of the road. Toward him.

This is not an accident.

Monica, he thought, the name arriving whole and urgent, I have to warn her.

He moved. He threw himself sideways and the SUV corrected again, and he registered the correction in the same instant the front of it reached him, and the world became impact and sound and then nothing, all of it out of order.

His body left the ground. The road came up. His phone hit the tarmac, skidded, and stopped somewhere at the edge of his sight, screen up, cracked in two directions.

He couldn’t get up.

He could hear something. His name. A voice from somewhere. Young Master Lucas. Running footsteps on

concrete.

He tried to open his eyes. He could see the road surface close to his face, the cracks in it, a darkness spreading from somewhere he couldn’t see.

“Monica,” he said, or thought he said. He wasn’t sure the sound left him.

He went somewhere that wasn’t the road.

Lucia was in the kitchen filling a glass of water. She lifted it and her hand failed her in a way she couldn’t explain, some grip that simply stopped working, and the glass hit the tiled floor and shattered, water spreading everywhere. She stood looking at the broken pieces with a coldness in her chest that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

“Lucia.”

Alexander stood in the doorway.

“Something” she started.

A guard came through behind him, out of breath the way people get when they’ve run hard toward something they don’t want to reach. His face carried news he hadn’t wanted to be the one to deliver.

“What happened?” Alexander asked.

The guard got the words out. Lucas. Outside the gate. A car.

Lucia heard each word on its own before they assembled into what they meant.

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Chapter 339

Then they did.

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The sound that came out of her wasn’t fear. It was the sound of something she could no longer hold, coming out of her regardless.

Alexander caught her before her legs gave out on their own.

She pushed past him. Past the guard. Through the door, across the drive toward the gate, running by the time she reached it, the kind of running where nothing else exists but what’s waiting at the end.

Ria appeared from somewhere. Lena came from the garden. Monica arrived at the gate from outside, already on her knees beside Lucas, both hands around his, which wasn’t moving.

He lay on his side, his face partly visible from where Lucia stood, not moving, blood on the road beneath him, blood on his jacket, his phone cracked on the tarmac nearby.

A sound came out of Lucia she didn’t know she could make.

She was beside him before she registered crossing the distance, gathering him the way you gather something precious that’s fallen and might break further if handled wrong, pulling his head gently onto her lap. He was heavy the way people are heavy when they aren’t helping you hold them.

She pressed her hand to his face and put her mouth close to his ear.

“Lucas. Open your eyes. Right now. Look at me.”

Nothing.

“Lucas, please.”

She kissed his forehead, tears landing on him, her hand staying on his face while she kept talking, trying to keep him here, in reach.

Alexander crouched beside her, his hand on Lucas’s shoulder gripping too tight for the situation, though his body had chosen it anyway. His voice, when it came, wasn’t the one he used for anything else in his life.

“Stay with us,” he said, to Lucas. “Don’t go. Stay with me.”

Ria knelt on the other side, two fingers at Lucas’s wrist, her face set into the kind of stillness she used when she needed to function through something.

“He’s breathing,” she said. “It’s there.”

“Is it” Alexander started.

“It’s there,” Ria said again.

Monica knelt with both hands over her mouth, her whole body shaking.

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