I Refuse To Be Your Second Wife Billionaire Albert!

Chapter Ten : Someone Was Watching Me.

Chapter Ten: Someone Was Watching Me

Aurora's POV

I arrived at Lumina Events the morning after the lobby confrontation with one intention.

To work.

I told myself that Victoria Hale did not have the power to walk back into my life and dismantle everything I had spent seven years constructing. Whatever had happened between us in the past belonged in the past. She was a chapter that had already closed, and I was not going to give her the satisfaction of reopening it simply by showing up with that smile and those carefully chosen words.

I had built this company without her.

I would protect it without her.

I gathered my team in the main conference room before nine and watched their faces as I walked them through the summit responsibilities. The excitement in the room was immediate and genuine. Mia was already three steps ahead of everyone, her tablet covered in colour coded notes and timelines. The rest of the team leaned forward in their seats the way people did when they understood that something significant was within reach.

Watching them settled something inside me.

This was why the last seven years had mattered.

Not Albert. Not Victoria. Not any of the history that kept trying to drag me backward.

This room. These people. This company that existed because I had refused to stay broken.

Nobody was going to take this from me.

I threw myself into the work with everything I had. Luxury venue comparisons filled my screen by mid morning. I reviewed accommodation arrangements for international guests, cross referenced transportation schedules against the summit agenda, evaluated entertainment proposals from three different production companies, and worked through the security requirements with a level of detail that left Mia quietly impressed.

Every completed task pushed Victoria further to the edges of my mind.

For a while it worked.

I was halfway through a venue presentation when a knock came at my office door.

Mia stepped inside.

"There is a delivery for you."

I looked up from my laptop.

"I was not expecting anything."

"There is no sender."

She placed an elegant cream coloured envelope on the edge of my desk before stepping back out and pulling the door shut behind her.

The room felt quieter than it had a moment before.

I looked at the envelope without touching it.

No company logo.

No return address.

Nothing printed on the front except my name, written neatly in ink I did not recognize.

A feeling I could not immediately name settled somewhere deep inside my chest.

I picked it up slowly and opened it.

Inside was a single photograph.

The moment I saw it my breathing stopped.

It was old. The kind of photograph that had been handled many times over many years, the edges slightly soft, the colours faded just enough to place it firmly in another decade of my life.

Albert and I.

Seven years ago.

We were laughing together without a care in the world, caught in a moment so unguarded that I had no memory of it being taken. I had never seen this photograph before. Not once. Not anywhere.

My fingers tightened around it slowly.

I turned it over.

Six words were written neatly across the back in the same ink as my name on the envelope.

Some memories should stay buried forever.

A cold feeling moved through me from the inside out.

I sat with it for a moment, not moving, not thinking, just feeling the weight of what I was holding.

Then I stood up.

I walked downstairs to reception with the envelope in my hand and asked the receptionist directly. She apologized immediately. The envelope had been left at the front desk by a courier she had not recognized. She had not thought to ask for identification because deliveries arrived regularly. No one else had seen who brought it. The security camera at the entrance had captured a figure in a dark coat but nothing that could identify a face.

Another dead end.

I walked back upstairs and sat at my desk and looked at the photograph for a long time.

Every time my eyes landed on it I felt the same thing.

Not grief. Not nostalgia.

Something colder than both of those.

Someone had taken this photograph seven years ago without either of us knowing.

Someone had kept it all this time.

And now someone had decided to send it to me.

The afternoon passed slowly. I moved through the remaining items on my summit list but my concentration had fractured and I could not fully reassemble it. The photograph sat face down on the corner of my desk and I did not look at it again, but I was aware of it the entire time the way you were aware of something that did not belong in a room.

By evening I had accomplished far less than I intended.

I gathered my things and left the office later than usual, stepping out into the night air and walking to my car with the quiet focus of someone trying to keep their thoughts orderly.

The drive home was unusually still.

I noticed at some point that I kept checking the rearview mirror without having made a conscious decision to do so. Each time I looked, the road behind me appeared as it should. Cars at normal distances. Headlights doing nothing unusual.

I told myself I was unsettled because of Victoria.

Her reappearance had left me on edge.

That was all this was.

I pulled into my apartment building and parked. I gathered my bag from the passenger seat, tucked the envelope inside, and stepped out onto the pavement.

The feeling returned the moment my feet touched the ground.

Stronger than it had been in the car.

I stopped walking.

Something made me turn toward the street slowly, without urgency, the way you turned when you already half knew what you were going to find.

Across the road, parked beneath the shadow of a large tree, sat a black sedan.

The windows were heavily tinted.

I could not see inside.

I stood completely still and looked at it.

The car did not move.

Several seconds passed in which neither the car nor I did anything at all.

Then the engine started.

The headlights came on.

Without hesitation the sedan pulled smoothly away from the curb and disappeared into the evening traffic as though it had simply been waiting for exactly this moment before deciding to leave.

I remained standing exactly where I was.

The envelope was still in my bag.

The photograph was still inside the envelope.

For the first time since Victoria had walked into the Kingsley Group lobby with that carefully arranged smile, the full weight of what her return actually meant settled over me with a clarity I had not been ready for before now.

She was not just a name from my past.

She was not just a woman who had once done something unforgivable and then disappeared.

She was here.

And she was close.

I unlocked my apartment door and stepped inside. I had barely set my bag down on the table when my phone vibrated on the counter.

Unknown number.

I looked at the screen for a moment before opening the message.

One sentence.

You looked beautiful in the blue dress today.

I stood completely still.

I had changed out of my work clothes before leaving the office. Nobody from the summit team had seen me after I changed. I had not told anyone what I was wearing.

Someone had seen me.

Someone who had been close enough to watch without being noticed.

And they wanted me to know it.