The Heiress He Underestimated novel Chapter 190

The Heiress He Underestimated

Chapter 190 What Remains Of Blood

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4 Finished

Margaret Nethys was having a lovely day. Since her break with Kieran, a weight had lifted. She’d even started painting again–small, watery landscapes that were terrible, but they made her happy. She was in her sunroom, putting the final, frankly disastrous, green blob on a canvas that was supposed to be a forest, when her doorbell rang.

“Just a moment!” she called, wiping her hands on a rag. She wasn’t expecting anyone. The florist had already come. Maybe it was the nice young man from the bookstore with the order of gardening journals she’d forgotten about.

She opened the door. It wasn’t the bookstore man.

Two large men in dark suits stood on her porch. They had the blank, polite faces of people who were very good at being intimidating without saying a word.

“Miss Nethys?” the first one said.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

“Your brother, Mr. Kieran Nethys, sent us. There’s been a… family emergency. He’s asked us to bring you to him immediately. For your safety.”

Margaret’s heart, which had been light all morning, sank like a stone. Safety. Kieran’s idea of safety had always been a cage. She took a step back. “What kind of emergency? I’ll call him myself.”

The second man moved, fast. He was inside her foyer before she could react, closing the door softly behind him. “I’m afraid there’s no time for calls, ma’am. The situation is volatile. We need to move now.”

“Now see here-” Margaret began, drawing herself up to her full height, which wasn’t very tall. She tried to summon the voice she’d used on Elera, the one that had finally found its steel. “You get out of my house this instant!”

The first man sighed, a sound of pure professional boredom. He pulled a small, sleek device from his pocket, it was not a gun but a cylindrical object with a metal tip. “I’m very sorry about this, ma’am. It won’t hurt.”

He touched it to the side of her neck. There was a brief, sharp pinch, like a bad bee sting. Then the world dissolved into fuzz, and the edges of her vision went dark. The last thing she saw was the man catching her gently as her knees gave way, his expression still blankly polite.

The video arrived at the cliff house just after lunch. It came as an encrypted link to a private server, flagged with the highest priority by Frost’s filters.

They were all in the war room–the new name for the library that had been festooned with extra monitors and Clara’s increasingly bizarre motivational sticky notes. One read “WWED?” with a little drawn crown. Clara said it stood for “What Would Elera Do?” but Elera was pretty sure the ‘E‘ had originally been something else.

Drakonius was reviewing the legal strategy for handing over the mercenaries. Elera was sketching a new dress design on a tablet, a nervous habit. Clara was trying to teach Frost the rules of some complicated board game she’d brought, which mostly involved Frost moving pieces at random and Clara gasping in

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16:25 Tue, Apr 14

Chapter 190 What Remains Of Blood

horror.

28%

Finished

Frost’s wrist comm buzzed. He looked at it, and his entire body went still. That was more frightening than if he’d shouted.

“Incoming,” he said, his voice flat. “Priority one. Source unknown, but the encryption signature has markers linked to Kieran’s known digital fingerprints from the USB drive.”

The playful mood evaporated. Elera put her tablet down. Drakonius closed his laptop. Clara swallowed her joke about Frost’s “aggressively incorrect” use of a game piece called The Architect.

“Put it on the main screen,” Drakonius said.

Frost tapped a command. The large monitor on the wall flickered to life.

It was Kieran. He was sitting in a room they didn’t recognize. Plain walls, cheap industrial carpet, a single weak light source from off–camera. It looked like a storage unit, or a cheap office rented by the hour. He was wearing a rumpled shirt, his hair was disheveled, and his eyes had a wild, glinty look to them. This wasn’t the polished, manipulative businessman. This was a cornered animal.

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