Substitute Bride, Stolen Heart

Chapter 9: A Voice From Nowhere

The phone felt heavier than it should have in my hand.

I read the message twice, three times, my pulse climbing higher with each pass. “I know who you really are, Avalene. And I know they're not the only ones with secrets.”

"Avalene."

Killian's voice pulled me back into the room. I looked up to find him watching me, that same watchful stillness from the wedding day settling over his features the look of a man who noticed everything and forgave nothing that didn't add up.

"What is it," he said. Not a question. A demand dressed politely enough to still be a request.

"Nothing." I locked the screen too fast, and I watched him clock the movement, his eyes narrowing a fraction.

"You went pale reading a text and you're telling me it's nothing."

"It's spam," I said. "A scam number. It happens."

He held out his hand, palm up, patient in a way that somehow made the lie feel heavier in my chest. "Let me see it, then."

My stomach twisted. If I showed him, he'd want answers I didn't have who knows about your family, what secrets, why would a stranger threaten you the same week you married into mine. If I didn't show him, I was lying to the one person who'd promised me, an hour ago, that none of this was conditional.

"Killian." I made myself meet his eyes. "I will tell you. I promise I will. I just need a minute to understand what it even means before I hand you something that might be nothing at all."

Something moved behind his expression, not quite anger, something closer to restraint being tested. He lowered his hand slowly.

"You have until tonight," he said. "Not because I don't trust you. Because I don't trust whoever sent it, and the longer you sit on something like that alone, the more dangerous it gets for both of us."

"Okay." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "Tonight."

He studied me another long moment, like he was deciding whether to push further, before his phone buzzed in his own pocket. He glanced at it, jaw tightening.

"I have to go into the office. A shipment issue at the eastern port, Marcus is trying to make it look like my mismanagement in front of the board." He hesitated at the door, eyes flicking back to me one more time. "Lock the estate gates behind Avery's car. And Avalene—" his voice dropped, quieter, almost gentle again "—whatever's in that message, we handle it together. You don't have to carry it alone just because you're used to carrying everything alone."

He left before I could answer, and I stood there in the receiving room with my phone burning a hole in my palm, feeling like the ground beneath the last hour of relief had already started to crack.

I waited until the sound of his car faded down the drive before I opened the message again, hands trembling.

ME: Who is this?

The reply came almost instantly, like whoever it was had been waiting.

UNKNOWN: Someone who's been watching your family for a very long time. Longer than you've been alive, Avalene.

ME: What do you want?

UNKNOWN: Just a conversation. Meet me tomorrow, alone. No husband, no bodyguards. If you bring anyone, I disappear — and you'll spend the rest of your marriage wondering what I would have told you.

A location dropped into the chat, a small café two districts from the estate, far enough from Voss territory that no one would recognize either of us.

UNKNOWN: Come alone, or don't come at all. Your choice. But I think you'll want to know why your parents really gave you away.

I read the last line four times, my chest going tight and cold.

Why your parents really gave you away.

Not "why they adopted a stranger's child out of charity." Not the story I'd been told my entire life, the one my mother trotted out at dinner parties like a badge of generosity. “Why they gave you away” like there had been another family before the Whitmores. Like the beginning of my life wasn't the blank, uncomplicated mystery I'd always assumed it was.

I sat down hard on the edge of the receiving room chair, phone still clutched in my hand, and for the first time since I'd walked down that aisle in my sister's place, I understood that the biggest secret in this story might not have belonged to Killian's family at all.

It might have belonged to mine and I had exactly one day to decide whether to go find out what it was, alone, without telling the one person who'd sworn to me an hour ago that I never had to face anything by myself again.