She Has His Eyes, and He’s Marrying My Stepsister Chapter 08

Chapter 8: The Burner

The garment bag had a wedding dress inside. She unzipped it right there in the kitchen to show me.

“Vera Wang,” she said sweetly. “Custom. Killian paid.”

Killian’s voice was ice. “Give me the key, Sloane.”

“Excuse me?”

“The key. Now.”

Her smile slipped for half a second. Then it was back. “Oh, honey, you’re tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She turned to me “Enjoy the guest room while it lasts, Wren. My lawyers will be in touch about that situation upstairs.”

She walked out. The door beeped shut behind her.

Killian slammed his palm against the counter so hard the whiskey glass jumped.

“Why did you agree to move the wedding up?” I whispered.

“I didn’t. Her father announced it to the board this afternoon without asking me.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “If I back out now, Richard pulls his shares and Voss Holdings crashes. Four thousand people lose their jobs.”

“So you’re going to marry her?”

He looked at me. “I’m going to destroy her. I just need proof first.”

Proof. I’d been carrying it around for a week without realizing.

The next morning, I dug out the black phone the kidnapper had dropped at the park. Killian’s people had already tried to trace it. Prepaid. Untraceable.

But Grant was a software engineer. And Grant was furious.

He sat at Killian’s dining table with three laptops open, chugging energy drinks.

“The burner’s been wiped,” he muttered. “But whoever used it was lazy. Look. The only number it ever texted is another burner. And that burner-” he typed fast, “-was activated using an old Gmail account.”

He turned the screen around.

sloane.r.princess2001@gmail.com

My blood ran cold,

“Now watch this.” Grant pulled up my old screenshot. The Get rid of it text. “This number. The fake London number Sloane gave you five years ago. I ran it through the same carrier database.”

Another click.

Same email. sloane.r.princess2001.

“She used the same email for both,” Grant said slowly. “Five years apart. She’s not a criminal genius. She’s just arrogant

Killian stood behind us, so still he barely seemed to breathe.

“She sent the text,” he said. “She sent the man to take my daughter.”

“To get a DNA sample before you could,” I whispered. “So she’d know what she was dealing with.”

Killian turned and walked out of the room. A second later, I heard something shatter in his office.

I found him standing over a broken lamp, his chest heaving.

“She took my daughter from a school,” he said hoarsely. “She put a stranger’s hands near her mouth. And I’ve been engaged to her.”

I stepped over the glass and took his hand. It was shaking.

“We have her now,” I said. “We have proof.”

He looked down at me. His eyes were red.

“Proof of a text,” he said. “Proof of a burner phone. A good lawyer makes that disappear in a week.” His fingers tightened around mine. “I want more. I want everything. I want her to lose every single thing she ever stole from you.”

That night, I couldn’t find Ivy’s favorite stuffed duck. I went looking in the hallway closet.

Behind a stack of boxes, I found a small wooden chest. It wasn’t locked.

Inside were letters. Dozens of them. Envelopes yellowed with age, each one addressed in Killian’s sharp, slanted handwriting.

To Wren Calloway.

Every single one was stamped in red.

RETURN TO SENDER.

And on the back of every envelope, in loopy pink pen, someone had drawn a tiny smiley face.