LOGINShare
Chapter 19: A Glimpse of the Lonely Monarch
Last Updated:
2025-09-06 16:39:37
Latest chapter
Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance Chapter 80: The Forbidden Dance
The Brian Worldwide ball, held annually, was a work of art in controlled spectacle. It happened in the city's top hotel's grand ballroom, a grand room filled with crystal and gold leaf, packed with the eastern seaboard's most influential and beautiful people. It was a night on which deals were cut in tones and handshakes, on which weddings were negotiated over champagne glasses, and on which the magnificence of Joe Brian's empire was presented in dazzling, breathtaking fashion.It was a particular sort of torture for Davidson. He was required to do his job: the handsome young protégé, the chosen heir, beguiling and witty and utterly at ease in his own skin. He smiled, he shook hands, he spoke pleasantly to senators and ladies, all the while sensing that he was a phony in his own flesh. Every laugh was a strain, every smile a crack in a thin facade. He could sense Melissa's loss like a ghost limb, a nagging, throbbing reminder of the life he was leaving behind with each passing second.
Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance Chapter 79: Torn between Altars
Sunday broke not in calm, but in the old, low-grade terror that had been the metronome of Davidson's life. The shattered stillness of the loft was a physical weight. Melissa had not talked to him since the argument. Her communication was a series of scrawled messages on the counter: Jake dentist 3pm. Sarah needs a poster board. The domestic choreography of shared life, devoid of all emotion, all sense of humanity. He was a ghost operating a household.The plan, the fragile, hopeless plan, was to go to church. It was a white flag. A symbol of normalcy. A chance to sit beside his family in the comforting pew, to warble the hymns, to incline his head to pray, and to pretend, for one hour, that the earth under his world wasn't crumbling into sand. He needed it. He needed the ritual, the structure, the false promise of forgiveness. And above all, he needed Melissa to see it.He was fastening his tie, his reflection in the hall mirror a pale imitation of a faithful husband, when his phone v
Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance Chapter 78: The Family Confrontation
The Tribeca loft had lost its silence. No longer was it an inert, wounded thing. It was now a choking, combative presence, a third entity that existed on unwritten words and festering distrust. It blossomed in the void between them at the dinner table, in the way Melissa would trail off mid-sentence when Davidson walked into the room, in the respectful distance now given to their father by the children, a disease of a sort that could be contracted through proximity.Davidson roamed around his own home as a ghost walking through the existence he'd built. Everything—the tangled photos of their wedding, the earliest crayoned drawing of their family gathered like stick figures under a bumpy sun that Sarah had ever made, the frayed seam on the couch where they'd lain together—was a judge. He was an imposter, a false husband living in a museum gallery of true love.The dam was bursting, weeks of leakage: the unaccountable bills, the late nights running into mornings, the emotional space lar
Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance Chapter 77: Brian's Undoing
Jealousy was a peasant emotion. It was for the deprived, for those who feared loss. Joe Brian did not need it. He had. He did not fear loss; he wrought permanence. He had spent a lifetime building up an immunity to such universal weaknesses, building his psyche into a fortress of self-containment. Need was a design flaw he had excised from his own personality with merciless completeness.The virus entered on what appeared to be a harmless vector: a sound.He made his jaw-dropping, blue-moon ceremonial pass through the trading floor—the lion among the hyenas, reminding them of the dominance that kept them alive. The air was its usual brutal symphony of greed and tension, a noise that he usually found as soothing as a lullaby, as it was the voice of his own dominance. His eyes, as they always did, swept the room for his anchor, his talisman: John Davidson.He did locate him. But not stabbing away at his terminal, scanning markets with that brutal, beautiful mind. He was by the coffee ma
Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance Chapter 76: Davidson's Choice
The paparazzi photo was not a rock; it was a depth charge, dropping deep into the calm waters of Davidson's life and detonating with quiet, debilitating power. The initial shock wave of press coverage had receded, but the damage had been done beneath the surface, in the dark, high-pressure depths where his marriage, his friendships, and his sense of self resided. The lawyerlike, bland denial by Brian's publicity machine had been akin to pouring oil on choppy waters—it smoothed the surface for public eyes to see but didn't disperse the toxic muck below.The first crack came from a most unlikely place. Mark, his college roommate, his last tether to a world of beer-soaked trivia nights and carefree camaraderie, called on a Saturday morning. The loft was a tomb of forced normalcy. Melissa moved through the kitchen with a robotic detachment, her back a wall of unspoken disapproval. The children, sensitive to the atmosphere of poisonous unease, were too subdued, their cartoons a tinny, absu
Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance Chapter 75: The Awakening of the Protégé
The leather-bound notebook was a small rebellion. It was not his workaday tablet, nor the family schedule on the kitchen fridge. This was personal, discretionary, analog. He had bought it at a busy, dusty stationery store in the Village, the kind that reeked of ink and old paper, light-years from the glass-and-steel reasonableness of his day-to-day life. Its cover was a dark, plush navy, blank and awaiting. It was heavily weighted in his hands.He had stopped praying. The words had lost their sense, echoing in the corners of his heart that seemed increasingly hollow. The pleas—"Lord, give me strength," "Father, direct me," "Remove this cup from me"—were now merely speaking into a disconnected switchboard. His religion, once a rock, had started to feel like a language no longer native to him. It was the man's words he had known, and that man was vanishing, as though a picture left in the sun.The journal was an overture to a new language. His own.The first entry was hesitant, scribble
You may also like
Under The Mask Of My Enemy
Park Cheal6.8K viewsWhen Loving You Became My Sweetest Destruction
Oling3.3K viewsOne Night Mistake By My Fiance's Uncle
Ellise8.5K viewsFalling For My Alpha Stepbrother.
Author Nengi6.7K viewsLove Didn’t Save Us. It Just Made the Fall Hurt More
Allen drinkvoke 144 viewsHOW I BECAME A GAY
Vic_Nexus508 viewsBehind the Spotlight
RAJI1.4K viewsOne Night Mistake: My Brother-in-Law, My Lover
Maribel S.1.6K views
