The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 143

Chapter 82-2

“What kind of agreement?”

“They paid the son a massive amount of money to leave the country permanently.”

“They paid him?” I echo, my voice rising in disbelief. “They literally rewarded a predator for terrorizing their own niece?”

“They explained it to me and Evelyn as removing a physical threat from her life,” he says.

“And Evelyn actually agreed to that?”

“No. She knew nothing about it until after he was paid and left the country.”

My existing physical nausea twists instantly into a deep, visceral rage. “What did she do?”

“She completely severed ties with the family. Just walked away.”

“Where did she go?”

“A small town in Canada called Georgetown. An old college friend offered her a safe place to stay where no one in the family could trace her.”

“And you stayed in contact with her.”

“Yes.”

“Secretly?”

“For a long time, yes.”

The full picture finally clicks into place. I can vividly picture a younger Locke, standing alone in the shadows, choosing Evelyn over his own flesh and blood while still attempting to navigate the high-stakes corporate world that had so utterly failed her.

“The payoff didn’t stop him, did it?” I say softly. “Nothing was going to stop him.”

“No,” Locke answers, his face turning into a mask of pure, unreadable steel. “It never does with assholes

like that.”

He pauses, taking a slow, steady breath before continuing into the darkest part of the story.

“Eleven months later, he returned to the country. He’d squandered the majority of the money through reckless gambling, and he’d convinced himself that my family had manipulated Evelyn into rejecting him.”

“He tracked her down to Canada.”

“Yes.”

“Locke… what did he do to her?”

“He ambushed her outside her apartment building late at night.”

Chapter 82-2

The bedroom drops into a suffocating silence.

“How badly was she hurt?” I whisper, dread pooling in my stomach.

Claim

Locke looks down at our joined hands, his thumb running over my knuckles with a mechanical rhythm.” Badly enough to put her in Intensive care for eight weeks. Not quite badly enough to kill her.”

My breath catches sharply in my throat. “She survived.”

“Yes. But she’s never truly the same after that.” His voice remains entirely controlled, but for the first time since we met, I can tell the control is holding a massive, burning fury in place.

“She permanently stopped working. She refused to travel anywhere alone. For years afterward, she couldn’t even unlock her own front door without checking every single window in the apartment first.”

“And how did your family react to that?” I ask.

“They offered to pay for her extensive medical treatments and psychological therapy,” Locke says, the disgust in his tone absolute. “They genuinely believed that opening their bank accounts proved they were fulfilling their moral responsibility to her.”

“They were responsible for what happened to her,” I insist firmly.

“Yes,” he agrees without a single second of hesitation.

“So what did you do next?”

“I took every single piece of evidence that I had gathered on the sick bastard, and handed it over to the police, the federal tax authorities, and the press.”

“Did he finally go to prison?”

“Yes. Thank fuck. He was convicted for the assault, financial fraud, tax evasion, and multiple counts of criminal stalking connected to the other women.”

“And I’m assuming your family tried everything in their power to stop you from going public.”

“My father told me that I was destroying decades of vital corporate relationships over what he classified as a ‘private internal tragedy’.”

My stomach turns over at the sheer, cold narcissism of it. “What did you say back to him?”

“I said him that their right to privacy permanently ended the moment they used it to protect a monster. And I left that night,” he says quietly.

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