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CHAPTER 18 :Diana
Date de publication:
2026-05-16 02:29:44
Dernier chapitre
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 46 :The Mask Removed
Marcus Hale had spent nine years being the most trusted man in Adrian Voss's life — and the moment that trust was formally broken, he became the most irrelevant.That was what surprised her. Not the removal itself — she had been building toward that for months — but the specific quality of the aftermath. She had expected the room to feel different once he was gone. Heavier, or lighter, or charged in some way. Instead it felt — settled. The way a room feels when something that had been slightly wrong about it for a long time is finally put right, and you understand only in the correcting of it how long it had been wrong.They stood in the living room for a moment. Adrian and Alina. The city outside. The light changing as the evening moved in."Are you all right?" she said."Yes." He said it with the particular directness of someone who has checked. "You?""Yes." She looked at the chair Marcus had been sitting in. "He came here deliberately. After everything that happened today — he cam
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 45:The Reckoning
Marcus Hale arrived at the penthouse unannounced at four forty-seven in the afternoon.Not at the clinic. That had been the fear — the immediate, physical fear that had sent Adrian out of the apartment in under three minutes and Alina calling her mother's floor nurse before the elevator doors had finished closing. But Diana Carter was in her room, reading, untouched. The security presence Wren had arranged three weeks ago was in place. Marcus had not gone to the clinic.He had come here.Alina was alone when the elevator opened. She did not know if that was deliberate on his part or circumstance. She suspected deliberate. Nine years of managing situations had made Marcus Hale very precise about timing.He walked in with his key — the key he had carried for nine years, to an apartment he had treated as an extension of his professional life — and he stopped when he saw her standing in the middle of the living room."Alina." Warm. Even now. After everything, in the first second, the warm
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 44:Return
She didn't knock. She still had the access card in her coat pocket from the night she left — and she had never once believed she would use it again.The board session had lasted three hours and forty minutes. She knew because she had watched the clock on the wall — not constantly, not anxiously, but the way you watch a clock when you need to stay anchored to something measurable while everything around you operates on a different kind of time.It was over now. The documents were on the table. The second witness — a former internal auditor who had left the company four years ago and who Wren had been quietly preparing for fourteen months — had given his statement by video call at the two-hour mark, and the room had changed in a way that did not change back. Three board members who had arrived as Frost's allies had stopped being allies within twenty minutes of the auditor finishing. Frost himself had said very little after the first hour. Marcus had remained warm and composed until Wren
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 43: Going Back
The boardroom was on the thirty-second floor, and Alina had never been in it.She had been in most rooms of Voss Industries over six months. The fourth floor corridor where she had stood at a water dispenser with her heart going hard. The lobby with its marble floors. The sixth floor where Pauline's daughter had started school. The forty-eighth floor, where the decisions were made, where the man at the centre of all of this went to be the version of himself the world required.She had not been in the boardroom. She walked into it now at ten fifty-eight, two minutes before the session was due to begin, and she walked in behind James Wren and she kept her head up and her pace steady and she did not look at Marcus until she had looked at every other person in the room first.There were fourteen people. She counted without appearing to. Fourteen faces turning to register her arrival — some with recognition, some with professional blankness, two with expressions she noted carefully as belo
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 42 :The Architect of Betrayal
The cars arrived at ten-fifteen. Three of them, black, identical — because James Wren had insisted on it. If Marcus was watching the building, he would see Adrian leave. He would not know which car held Alina, or whether she was in any of them.She was in the second one. Wren was beside her with his briefcase across his knees and the particular stillness of a man who had been preparing for this room for three years."Walk me through the order," she said. Not because she didn't know it. Because saying it out loud, in sequence, with someone who knew it as well as she did, was the way she steadied herself before difficult things."Adrian enters with the board already assembled," Wren said. "Frost will have arrived early — he always does, it's a dominance habit. We allow them the early arrival. We do not arrive until ten fifty-eight." He looked at her. "When we come in, we come in together. You, me, the documentation. The visual communicates something before a word is spoken.""That we ar
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 41: Serena's Warning
Serena Voss looked smaller than usual when she walked into the coffee shop — not physically, but in the way that people shrink when they're carrying something they shouldn't have to carry alone.She had texted at seven in the morning: I need to talk to you. Not about the board session. Something else. Come alone.Alina had left the penthouse at eight-fifteen with the board session at eleven, which gave her an hour. She found Serena at the back of the café near the window, already there, both hands around a coffee she wasn't drinking."How did last night go?" Serena said."Fine. Wren filed the complaint. Adrian is ready." She sat down. "What did you find?"Serena looked at her coffee. She had the expression of someone who had been awake for some time practising how to say something. "I found something in my brother's personal files," she said. "Not his business files. Personal. He has a — there's an account he's maintained separately for years. Personal expenditures, private correspond
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 4:The Terms
The contract was twelve pages long. Alina read every single word twice and still couldn't find the answer to the most important question: why her, when a man like Adrian Voss could have arranged this with anyone.She spread it across the kitchen table at midnight, still in her coat, because since
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 3: Forty-Eight floors up
The elevator opened onto the forty-eighth floor and the first thing Alina thought to herself was: this is what control looks like when it has a budget.Everything was grey ,neat and very, very quiet. The kind of quiet that wasn't natural — the kind that had been intentionally created. She could h
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 2:A Name Like a Warning
Every person Alina asked about Adrian Voss gave her the same response: a sharp deep breath, then silence, then the careful face of someone deciding how honest to be.She started with Priya at work because Priya knew everything about everyone and was constitutionally unable to stop herself from shar
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 1:The Devil's Offer
The eviction notice was still warm in Alina's hand when the black car pulled up outside her door.She was sitting on the front door step when it happened. Not because she'd chosen to sit outside but because her legs had simply stopped cooperating somewhere between the mailbox and the door, she fou
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