The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 252

Chapter 127-1

The blizzard has gathered strength, heavy white sheets of snow erasing the mountains, leaving us suspended in a quiet, pale void.

I don’t move. I stay pressed against Locke’s side, my fingers woven tightly through his, my heart hammering a frantic, painful rhythm against my ribs.

“He found her,” I whisper, the words barely audible over the faint hum of the fireplace.

“He found her,” Locke confirms. “It was a Tuesday night in November, and Georgetown was already freezing. Evelyn had just finished her evening online class and she walked out to her car to grab her gym bag, so she could do laundry.”

He pauses, taking a slow, heavy breath that rattles deep in his chest. The silence in the room stretches so long that I can hear the muffled wind howling around the eaves of the building.

“He was waiting in the parking lot outside her apartment building,” Locke says. “He didn’t speak, he didn’t offer an explanation. He just stepped out of the dark with a tire iron and attacked her from behind.”

A sharp, painful gasp tears from my throat. I cover my mouth with my free hand.

“Oh God… Locke…”

“He beat her until she stopped moving,” Locke says. “He shattered her collarbone, her nose, and both cheekbones, fractured her skull in four places, broke three of her ribs, and crushed her right hand. He left her bleeding on the frozen gravel in twenty-degree weather, got back into his rental car, and drove away.”

I sigh. I can just picture it all so clearly: a young, innocent woman who had given up everything just to feel safe, left broken in the freezing dark by a monster who had been handed two million dollars by the people meant to protect her.

The sheer cruelty of it suffocates me, a heavy weight settling on my chest until every breath feels like cut glass.

“As you know, Evelyn survived,” Locke says, his hand moving up to cradle the back of my head, holding me firmly against his heart. “A neighbor heard the noise and called an ambulance. She was in intensive care for eight weeks. Two months in a sterile hospital room, hooked up to ventilators and feeding tubes, fighting for every single breath.”

“Did you go to her?” I ask.

“I took the first flight to Canada the second my phone rang,” Locke says, his voice thick with a raw, bleeding emotion he rarely lets show. “I sat in that ICU chair for fifty-eight days, Zara.”

“I’m not surprised. At all.”

“I watched her lie in that bed, covered in bruises, her face smashed beyond recognition, tube after tube keeping her alive. I held her hand, and every single second I sat in that quiet room, listening to the heart monitor beep, I knew my father’s money had paid for that fucking animal to rent that car. It had paid for the gas that brought that fucking monster to Evelyn.”

A cold, visceral fury burns through my grief, hot and fierce. “Your family… what did they do when they

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<Chapter 122+.

found out?”

tocke lets out a low, bitter laugh, a sound completely devoid of humor.

Clam

“My father called me while I was sitting by her bedside,” Locke says. “He offered to cover all her medical bills. He offered to pay for top-tier private physical therapy and the best psychological trauma specialists in the country. He genuinely believed that writing another check would absolve him of the blood on his hands. He thought money was the universal eraser.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him if he ever stepped foot in her hospital room, or if he ever uttered her name again, I would tear his company down brick by brick,” Locke says. “I hung up on him. And I never spoke to him as a son again.”

I look up at him, meeting his dark, fierce gaze. “And Julian?”

Locke’s eyes turn into twin pools of dark, unyielding slate.

“I didn’t wait for my family, and I didn’t wait for their high-priced lawyers,” Locke says. “I took every single piece of evidence I had gathered on Julian Fielding over the years.”

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