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CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
publish date:
2026-04-14 04:07:17
Latest chapter
HIS SECRET ADDICTION CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
Alex's POVThe document was twelve pages long and I read all of it standing in a diner booth at eleven o'clock at night with fluorescent lights humming above my head and Robert Haines watching my face from across the table and Damien so still beside me that I kept checking his breathing to confirm he was still present in his body.By page four I understood why Richard Sterling had spent thirty years making sure nobody went near that vault.By page eight I understood why he had been so desperate to remove Damien from leadership. Not because Damien was a liability. Because Damien was a threat. Specifically, because Damien was the kind of meticulous, thorough, uncompromising person who would eventually audit everything and find what was buried and Richard had known that from the moment Damien took over and started correcting his father's mistakes one by one.By page twelve I was sitting down because my legs had stopped cooperating."He owns part of the company," I said."Forty-one percen
HIS SECRET ADDICTION CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
Alex's POVThere is a specific kind of tiredness that goes so deep it loops back around and becomes something that feels almost like calm. I was in that place. I had been running on adrenaline and urgency for four straight hours and now, standing in the marble lobby of Cross Industries at ten thirty at night, looking at a security guard who had just said the name Robert Haines, I felt the calm of someone who has simply run out of capacity to be shocked and has arrived somewhere on the other side of it.Damien hadn't moved.That told me everything about how significant this was. Damien Cross processed things fast. He was almost never the last person in a room to arrive at the next step. But he was standing beside me in the lobby with his hand still over mine and he had gone completely still the way a building goes still right before something structural happens to it."Trevor's father," I said quietly."Yes.""Did you know he was in New York.""I didn't know he existed in any practical
HIS SECRET ADDICTION CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
Damien's POVI watched Alex read those four words and I watched the color leave his face the way it leaves a room when someone turns off the light, all at once and completely, and I understood in that moment that whatever Richard Sterling had done tonight, whatever moves he had made, this one was different. This one wasn't about the company or the board or the evidence or even about me. This one was about a sixty-three year old woman who had spent twenty years being quiet because she had no other choice, and Richard had just decided that her silence was still his to control.Alex called her before I could say anything. He was already standing, already moving toward the window the way he did when he needed to think and move at the same time, and I stayed where I was because there are moments when the most useful thing you can do for someone is hold the room steady while they handle the thing that needs handling.She picked up immediately."Mom." His voice was controlled in the way that
HIS SECRET ADDICTION CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
Damien's POVI have been surprised exactly four times in my professional life. The first was when my father told me the company was failing. The second was when Trevor sold our story to a journalist. The third was when I opened a hotel room door and found Alex Carter standing on the other side of it. And now this. A photograph of Sophie Chen standing beside Richard Sterling in what was clearly a hotel room, four years ago, both of them dressed like they'd just come from an event, close enough that the distance between them told its own story before I'd read a single word.I stared at that photograph for a long time. Longer than was useful. My brain kept trying to reject what my eyes were giving it because Sophie Chen was the person I trusted most in this company after Marcus. Sophie had been the one to get ahead of Farrow. Sophie had authenticated the drive. Sophie had built the entire case that had just removed Richard from this boardroom. She had been the architecture of everything
HIS SECRET ADDICTION CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
Alex's POVThere are moments in your life when the ground shifts so completely that you stop feeling like yourself for a second. Like you've stepped outside your own body and you're watching from somewhere slightly above, looking down at the person who just heard the most impossible thing and trying to understand why they're still standing.James.My brother James. The one who called to check on me. The one who asked if I was being smart. The one who had sat across from me at our mother's kitchen table every Thanksgiving for thirty-two years and who I had trusted so completely and so automatically that I had never once thought to question it. James who was a lawyer. James was supposed to understand what loyalty meant because he'd built his entire career on the concept of it.James had called Richard Sterling's people himself.I put the phone down on the boardroom table very carefully, the way you handle something when you're afraid of what you'll do if you're not careful, and I looked
HIS SECRET ADDICTION CHAPTER NINETY
Alex's POVMarcus picked up before the phone had even finished its first ring, which told me he'd been waiting for us to call, which told me he already knew something we didn't."Tell me what you have," Damien said. He had the phone between us so I could hear, and we were still standing in the boardroom because neither of us had moved toward the door yet. The photograph of me and Trevor was still on the table. The chairs were still pushed at wrong angles from people leaving in a hurry. The room looked like the aftermath of something, because it was."Richard made two calls when he left," Marcus said. His voice had the specific flatness it got when he was delivering information he didn't want to deliver. "The first was to his attorney. That one we expected." A pause that lasted just long enough to make my stomach tighten. "The second was to a man named Gerald Pitt. He's a senior editor at the National Financial Register."Damien went very still beside me."The Register ran the story ab
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