Page 11 of The Vows He Buried
“That’s what my family’s lawyers are about to find out,” I said.
An hour later, I was sitting in a leather chair in a top-floor conference room at the BlakeCore tower in downtown Greenwich. The room was the antithesis of the Vale world. It was all clean lines, modern art, and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Long Island Sound. It was a room that hummed with quiet, confident power. My power.
Mark Jennings, a sharp, silver-haired man who had been our family’s legal counsel for twenty years, sat opposite me. He had listened to my story without interruption, his expression growing grimmer with each detail.
“This is… monstrous, Savannah,” he said when I finished. “On a personal level, I am horrified. On a legal level… this is a declaration of war. And the Vales have given you a formidable arsenal.”
He slid a single sheet of paper across the polished table. A petition for the dissolution of marriage. Simple, clean, devastating.
“This is the first shot,” he said. “Once we file this, they will be served. Maddox will be served at his office. The media will know within the hour. There’s no going back.”
“I have no intention of going back,” I said.
I picked up the pen. It felt light in my hand, a weapon, not a shackle. I looked at the line at the bottom.Savannah Blake Vale.
With a steady hand, I signed my name. But I didn’t sign the name they had given me. I signedSavannah Blake. I drew a clean, deliberate line through the wordVale. It was a small act of rebellion, but it was everything. It was me, reclaiming my name, reclaiming my life.
As I put the pen down, a profound sense of peace settled over me. The first step had been taken. The paper had been signed.
We spent another hour discussing strategy, poring over my copy of the prenup, Mark highlighting clauses he already saw as potentially problematic. As we were wrapping up, Jasper, who had been on his phone in the corner of the room, came over.
“Interesting development,” he said, his expression thoughtful. “My head of security just flagged something. There’s a discreet surveillance team that’s set up around the Greenwich house. They’ve been there since last night.”
My blood ran cold. “The Vales?”
Jasper shook his head. “No. This is not their style. Their guys are brutish ex-cops. This team is quiet, professional, almostinvisible. My guy says they’re top-tier. He ran the plates on one of their vehicles.” He paused, looking at me. “They belong to the Zion Group.”
Lucian Thorne.
He was watching me. The thought sent a strange, unsettling shiver through me. It wasn't fear. It was something else, something I couldn't name. Why? Was he an enemy or an ally? Had he saved me only to study me? The man was an enigma, a ghost who had appeared, altered the course of my life, and vanished, leaving only his name and a thousand questions in his wake.
“Keep an eye on them,” I told Jasper. “I want to know if they make a move.”
The drive back home was different from the one the night before. The silence was no longer heavy with grief; it was filled with the quiet hum of purpose. I was no longer a refugee. I was a general on my way back to the war room.
When I got back to my room, I pulled out the burner phone. It vibrated with a new message from Harper. My heart hammered against my ribs as I opened it.
The message was short, a bombshell that changed everything.
Vannah. Mark Jennings sent me a scan of the prenup. I found it. Page 34, appendix C, the transfer of intellectual property rights for Lynelle. The notary stamp is a forgery. It was never legally witnessed or filed with the state. The entire contract is built on a fraudulent clause.
I read the words again, my breath catching in my throat.
Harper’s next message came a second later, and it landed with the force of a physical blow.
If that clause is fraudulent, the whole contract is invalid. Vannah… you were never legally married to Maddox Vale.
Chapter 9: The Apartment
The words on the burner phone’s screen seemed to rearrange reality itself.You were never legally married to Maddox Vale.
I sank onto the edge of my bed, the phone slipping from my numb fingers. The room, my childhood sanctuary, suddenly felt too small, the air too thick to breathe. It wasn't the triumphant, liberating blow I had expected. It was a quiet, seismic shock that fractured the very foundation of my past.
Three years. A thousand and ninety-five days of my life, lived as a wife. The public smiles, the private tears, the crushing loneliness, the systematic erasure of my identity—all of it had been predicated on a single, fundamental fact: my marriage. And now, that fact had been revealed as a fiction. A fraud.
It meant the vows I had honored were never binding. The name I had carried was never legally mine. The woman I had been—Mrs. Maddox Vale—had never actually existed. She was a ghost, a character in a play staged by the Vales, and I had been the unwitting lead actress. The grief, the sacrifice, the child… it was all real. But the marriage that had been the cause of it all was a lie.
A strange, hysterical laugh bubbled up in my throat. It was a sound I didn't recognize, sharp and brittle. I wasn't the wronged wife. I was the defrauded partner in a business deal gone horribly wrong. The Vales hadn't just broken a marriage; they had orchestrated a three-year-long deception. The forged notary stamp wasn't just a legal loophole; it was the key that unlocked the truth. They had been so desperate to secure the BlakeCoreconnection, so arrogant in their power, that they hadn't even bothered to make their cage legally sound.
