His Contract Wife's Secret Twins

CHAPTER NINE

Zahara's POV

The drive to Priya's house felt shorter this time, though nothing about the night had grown any less heavy.

I kept checking the mirrors out of habit more than suspicion...the city thinning into quieter streets the farther I got out from the estate, and by the time I parked outside Priya's building my hands had finally stopped shaking—enough to pull the key from the ignition.

She opened the door even before I could knock. Her face was pale under the hallway light...with a baby monitor she clutched in one hand even though the twins had not needed one in years.

"They are asleep…" she said quietly, stepping aside to let me in. "It took forever. Edward kept asking if the man was going to come back again."

"And Cherry?"

"Quieter about it, but she noticed everything. She always does." Priya locked the door behind me, checking it twice the way she never used to.

"I put extra blankets over the window in their room. I know it does not really do anything, but it made Edward feel better."

I walked down the short hallway and stood in the doorway of the room that had become theirs...whenever the world outside grew too sharp for our apartment to hold.

Cherry was curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek; breathing slow and even.

Edward had kicked his blanket half off, his small chest rising and falling in the particular restless way that told me his sleep had not come easily tonight.

I sat on the edge of the bed between them, careful not to wake either of them, as I calmly let myself watch them for a long moment—exactly the way I had done on countless nights when the rest of my life felt too complicated to carry alone.

Five years I had kept them invisible, building a careful names for them, careful schedules, and careful distance from anything that could trace back to the Lawson estate or the world I had once belonged to.

I had believed, foolishly perhaps, that invisibility was the same thing as safety, that if no one could see them; no one could touch them.

But today, when a stranger with a camera had said my son's name before Edward had ever offered it, every assumption I had built around my life cracked a little further.

I brushed a strand of hair from Cherry's forehead, and she stirred slightly without waking, her fingers curling instinctively toward mine the way they had; since she was small—enough to fit along one forearm.

Edward mumbled something in his sleep, a fragment of a word I could not make out, and turned toward the sound of my voice even unconscious.

They did not know their father's name. They did not know that somewhere across the city—in a house with a locked room and a poisoned aunt, and a husband who studied me like a puzzle he had not yet solved; the man who had given them his eyes and his stubborn chin sat awake wondering who I had been sneaking out to see.

I left the bedroom quietly and found Priya waiting in the kitchen, two cups of tea already poured; even when neither of us would likely drink much of it.

"You look like you have not slept in days," she said, sliding one cup toward me across the counter.

"I have not, not really." I wrapped my hands around the warm ceramic more for something to hold—than for the heat.

“Armando is asking questions I cannot keep dodging forever. Tonight he had my phone in his hand before I even got downstairs. He knew you had called, eleven times.”

Priya's eyebrows rose. Slow. Calm. As her eyes widened. "What did you tell him?"

"That you were a friend going through a hard time." I stared into the tea, watching the steam curl then vanish.

"Beside...it is wasn't even a lie but it is just not the whole truth, and I could see in his face that he knew it too."

"Zahara, you cannot keep doing this."

Her voice was gentle...but there was an edge under it I had heard more than once over the years. The particular frustration of someone who loved me enough to keep telling me the hard thing, even when I did not want to hear it.

"Today it was a stranger with a camera. What happens when it is someone who actually means them harm and you are three counties away pretending to visit a sick friend."

"I know..." I set the cup down, my hands finally steady.

"I have been thinking about it the whole drive here. I cannot keep hiding them and hoping the world stays far enough away. If someone already knows Edward's name, and if someone already knows enough to send a photographer to your building, then hiding is not protecting them anymore. It is just delaying the moment then everything falls apart at the worst possible time."

"So what do you want to do instead?"

For a moment, my mind drafted back. I thought of Fiona's voice through a half open door—with a name she said, that should have meant nothing to Armando but now clearly meant everything.

I thought of the nurse's warning drifting from behind the locked room—Poison. Levels climbing. Someone running out of time.

And I thought of my mother's face, half remembered from my childhood, with the strange too.

A cold certainty runs through me, that all of these threads were tangled together in ways I had not yet begun to understand.

"I want to control it..." I said finally. "Not the whole truth, not yet, I am not ready for that and neither is he. But I cannot keep letting other people decide when and how my children's existence becomes public. If someone is already circling them, then I need to know who, and be the one who decides what they find when they look."

Priya studied me for a long moment, some of the worry in her face settling into something steadier; more familiar.

"That sounds like the version of you I remember from before all of this. The one who did not wait for permission to protect what mattered to her."

"That version of me did not have this much to lose."

I managed something close to a smile, though it did not quite reach the exhaustion still sitting behind my eyes. "But maybe it is time she came back anyway."

I stayed until the sky outside began to lighten at the edges. I was really unwilling to leave, until I was certain the twins would wake to an ordinary morning; instead of another frightened one.

When I finally drove back toward the estate, with the city waking slowly around me; I felt something harden in my chest that had not been there before...a resolve sharper than the fear that usually accompanied a secret drives home.

I would find out who had sent that photographer. And I would find out what waited behind Armando's locked door, and why my mother's name lived inside it.

And whatever it cost me, I was no longer willing to be the only one standing guard; over a secret that clearly had more enemies than I had ever let myself imagine.

***

I let myself in through the side entrance...just as the household was beginning to stir, and I nearly collided with Marta in the hallway.

Her arms full of fresh linens, her expression carefully neutral in a particular way that meant she had something to say but had been told not to say it.

"Mrs. Ivas." She hesitated, glancing once toward the staircase...before lowering her voice. "Mrs. Lawson is here. She arrived early this morning and asked to wait for you in the sitting room. She said it was a matter of family, and that it could not wait.”