LOGINShare
CHAPTER 7 :FIRST RULES
publish date:
2026-04-18 17:17:42
Latest chapter
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 40 :The Space Between
Freedom, it turned out, had a weight to it that Alina hadn't expected — and it pressed down on her chest every time she walked past her phone. She arrived at the penthouse at ten forty-five. The elevator opened and Adrian was already there — not standing waiting, that would have been too much, but in the living room with his laptop and three phones and James Wren on the screen, which meant he had been in the middle of this for some time. He looked up when she came in. The look lasted two seconds. She read everything in it that he did not say: that she was there, that she had come back, that this was the fact his evening had been organised around whether he admitted it or not. Then the two seconds passed and he was back to Wren on the screen and the phones and the work of what needed to happen before eleven tomorrow morning. "Sit down," James Wren said, from the screen. "There's a lot to cover." She sat. She set her bag by the sofa. She was still in the jacket she had grabbed at E
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 39 :Shattere
The thing about having the truth confirmed is that it doesn't bring the relief you bargained for — it just makes the wound exact. He left after an hour. She sat on Ethan's sofa and listened to the door close and the footsteps go down the corridor and the building go quiet, and she sat there with the full weight of everything he had said and let it be exactly as heavy as it was. She did not cry. She had made a habit, over the years, of not crying in the middle of things — she cried at the end of them, when it was safe, when there was nobody to see her do it and nobody she needed to be competent for. But the middle of things required all of her, and this was still the middle. Ethan came out of the kitchen at some point. He sat beside her. He didn't speak. After a while she said: "He was honest." "I know. I could hear it." "He didn't minimise it." "No." "He said the pasta Thursday was when the plan started to fail." She heard how that sounded. "I know how that sounds." "It sound
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 38: The Confession
Adrian Voss had built his entire life on knowing what to say and when — and standing in Ethan's doorway facing Alina Carter, he had nothing. She had not expected him to come in person. Wren's two o'clock call had covered the operational details — timeline, documentation, what each of them needed to do in the next forty-eight hours — and she had been sitting with Ethan afterward, processing it, when the knock came at the door. Ethan opened it. They looked at each other — Adrian Voss and Ethan Cole, the two people most invested in Alina's outcome standing on opposite sides of a doorframe for the first time since a midnight check and a mutual unspoken understanding that they were now, whether they liked it or not, on the same side. Ethan stepped back. "I'll make tea," he said. And disappeared with the particular tact of someone who understood exactly when a room needed to be emptied. Adrian came in. He looked at the flat — the sofa, the film poster, the plant. The gap between this an
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 37:His Voice on the Phone
He didn't ask where she was going. He said her name, and it was enough to stop her feet from moving. She had been at Ethan's for two days. Two days of sleeping on his sofa, which was too short for her by four inches and which she had slept on enough times in her life that her body simply adapted. Two days of Ethan making food she didn't ask for and not asking the questions he was clearly thinking, which was its own form of love. Two days of checking her phone more than she had in months and telling herself she was checking for news from James Wren. She was in the middle of her second morning — coffee in her hand , Ethan's laptop, and a document from Wren she was meant to review — when her phone rang. Adrian. She stared at his name on the screen for three rings. She answered on the fourth. "Are you alright?" was the first thing he said. "I'm fine. Ethan's sofa is short but I'm fine." A pause. She could hear him exhale slightly — not dramatically, just the small release of a brea
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 36 :Running
Alina had spent six months learning how to stay — and now she had exactly forty minutes to learn how to leave. Not from fear. Not because Marcus had frightened her into it — she had sat with that possibility on the drive back and examined it cleanly and decided it was not what was happening. She was leaving because James Wren had called an emergency meeting that evening and the first thing he had said when they all sat down was: we are ready. We move in seventy-two hours. And the second thing he had said was: Alina, for your safety and the integrity of the case, I need you out of the penthouse tonight. Legal reasons. Clean lines. The integrity of the witness position. She understood it. She still sat in her room for ten minutes after Adrian had explained it before she started packing. He stood in her doorway. "You don't have to rush," he said. "Take everything." "I don't need everything." She opened the wardrobe. She got her suitcase down. "I came with one bag. I can leave with
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 35 :Danger in the Room
Marcus Hale had always been the most composed person in every room — and standing across from Alina Carter, watching her connect the final dots, he finally wasn't. She had not planned the confrontation. It happened the way the worst things happen — not dramatically, not at a moment of readiness, b
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 34 :The Truth About Marcus
Trust, Alina had learned, was not simply given or withheld — it was constructed, piece by piece, and the person who built it for you had decided exactly how fragile to make it. She had been in the study with Adrian for two hours. Not for any arranged reason — she had come in with a question about
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 33: Ethan Finds Out
Ethan had always known something was wrong. What he hadn't known — what he had been carefully not knowing, in the way of someone who loves a person enough to let them have their secrets until they're ready — was that he was part of why. He came to the penthouse the morning after. He came because A
Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire CHAPTER 32 :Adrian at Night
The city never fully slept, and neither did Adrian — because the thoughts that were manageable in daylight became uncontainable at 3 a.m. They had found Ethan at his apartment. Not taken — that had been the fear, the specific cold fear that had sent Alina out of her room at midnight without shoes,
You may also like
Pursuing My Ex-Wife Isn't Easy
Inked Snow3.3M viewsOn My Professor's Bed
Xee write820.4K viewsHired a Gigolo, Got a Billionaire
Kayla Sango856.0K viewsSatisfying Her Darkest Fantasies
Shile1.0M viewsForbidden Fantasies A Steamy Collection
Gumnijir217 viewsAPHROXIS: GAME OF DESIRE
Jåney Writes80 viewsRuined by Mr Voss
STEPHANIE . I149 viewsThe Nanny Is the Billionaire's Missing Wife
Everglory72 views
