The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 98

Chapter 62-2

Locke is standing near the far end of the room with one hand braced against the polished wood and the other wrapped around a coffee he doesn’t appear to have touched. His clothes are the same ones he wore yesterday.

His jaw is shadowed with stubble, there’s a faint smear of dirt near one shoulder, and exhaustion sits in every hard line of his body.

He turns before I say anything. Our eyes meet.

The room doesn’t disappear. No music swells. Nobody stops moving. Glasses still clink behind the bar, and someone laughs in the game room as though the world hasn’t shifted beneath my feet.

Yet the distance between us feels enormous.

His gaze moves over me automatically, checking my face, my arms, my posture, every visible inch of me. The same way he always does, except this time he does it from across the room.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

The question is so careful, so formal, that it almost hurts.

“Yes.” I pause. “You?”

“Yes.”

Jade looks between us and mutters, “Well, this is excruciating.”

Neither of us smiles.

Locke puts down the untouched coffee. “Cobra’s waiting.”

We walk to Dad’s office without touching, and that’s the strangest part. Not the silence or the stiffness, but the absence of Locke’s hand at the small of my back. We’ve crossed dozens of rooms together in the past few weeks, and somewhere along the way, his touch became so natural I stopped noticing it.

Now I notice every inch of empty space.

Dad is seated behind his desk when we enter. Mayhem follows us in from the garage, and Jade slips through the door behind him before closing it.

Locke remains standing while the rest of us settle around Dad’s desk. He places a thick folder on the polished surface, then removes several photographs and spreads them between us.

My apartment building. The shopping centre. The garage where Knox ambushed me. The exterior of the clubhouse. The parking entrance beneath Locke’s penthouse.

A cold sensation crawls across my skin. “What is this?”

“Knox’s pattern.” Locke’s voice is rough from lack of sleep. “I went back through every time Knox appeared somewhere Zara was expected to be.”

Dad’s expression hardens. “You did this alone?”

13

Chapter 62

Clam

Locke glances at him. “Yes.” He points to the first photograph. “Turns out, I was wrong. I thought Knox was Tollowing Zara.

My stomach tightens “You mean he wasn’t?”

Locke looks at me now, fully and directly. “No. In most cases, he was waiting for you.” He taps the timestamp beneath the photograph from the shopping centre. “Knox entered the parking garage twenty-three minutes before Zara and Jade arrived.”

Jade frowns. “But we didn’t decide where we were going until after I kidnapped her from Cobra’s office.”

“I know.” Locke points to another photograph. “He was outside Zara’s apartment nearly an hour before she arrived there with me.” Another. “He watched the Cobra LLC. construction yard before the excavator shipment.”

Dad leans forward.

“He knew when Zara started working in the garage,” Locke continues. “He knew when she left the clubhouse. He knew when she wasn’t staying at her apartment.”

The silence deepens with every sentence.

Mayhem folds his arms. “So somebody’s talking to him. To Knox.””

“Maybe,” Locke says.

Jade immediately shakes her head. “Nobody here would help that prick.”

“I didn’t say they would,” Locke says.

“You’re suggesting it.”

“I’m considering every possibility.”

Locke’s voice remains calm, but I see the exhaustion beneath it, the frustration of a man who has spent an entire night working through a problem and found only more questions.

Mayhem looks toward the closed office door as though he can see everyone beyond it. Tucker. Diesel. Brick. Hawk. Men we’ve trusted for years, some of them for my entire life.

“You think it’s someone inside?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” Locke’s answer is immediate. “I won’t accuse family without evidence.”

Dad studies him. “But?”

Locke looks down at the photographs again. “I don’t think Knox is simply being told where Zara is. There are too many locations, too many times he’s arrived before anyone could reasonably have warned him.”

My eyes move across the images.

Knox beside my building.

Knox waiting at the shopping centre.

Chapter 62.

Knox across from the garage.

Always still. Always patient. Always early.

“He never seems rushed, say..

Every face turns toward me, but barely notice. I’m looking at Knox, remembering each encounter, the awful calm with which he stepped out of parking garage shadows that he had chosen long before I arrived.

“He’s never looking for me,” I continue slowly. “He already knows where I’ll be.”

Locke’s gaze catches mine, and the old rhythm between us returns for one brief heartbeat.

“He isn’t following your movements,” he says. “He’s observing them in advance somehow.”

た

Dad rubs one hand across his jaw. “GPS trackers or microphones on Zara somehow?”

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