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Chapter 183. Jonah's Speech

Author: Clare
last update Last Updated: 2025-10-04 13:45:39

The boardroom door had never looked so much like the entrance to a coliseum. Robert Clarkson stood before it, the stifled screams of rage muffled by a dull roar against the highly polished wood. He had gambled on everything. He had gambled his empire, his reputation, his very sanity, on the scales for the man he loved. And now he was going to go in there alone and face the lions.

He took a soothing breath, hands on the cold brass handle. This was when he would be torn apart, or…

The door cracked open from the other side.

Jonah Magnus stood there.

He was not dressed in his typical learned dishevelment, but in a severe, black suit that made him look like a razor edge. His face was pale, but tranquil, his eyes still, appallingly clear. He was holding one, worn, leathery old journal.

For a heart-stopping instant, they simply stared at one another in the still anteroom. Clarkson's mind reeled. How? Why? Stiles must have told him. He had betrayed the plan, and Jonah had come… to stop him? T
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  • Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love   Chapter 191. Jonah's Faith

    The Clarkson storm had passed, and had washed the landscape clean and raw. He was scraped down to the nerve, hollowed out. Silas Coombes' ghost, the festering secret of once, now remained in the room, openly, a silent, melancholy presence that could no longer haunt but only grieve. Its heaviness was still suffocating, but a different kind of heaviness—a shared burden, a shrine to an ancient mistake, not an operational poison.He perched on the end of the couch, knees folded, elbows on knees, forehead against his hands. He could sense the tremble of his fingers, the after-jolt of having exposed the most shameful part of himself. He waited for the other shoe to drop. For Jonah's empathy to harden into cold, mute distance. For the dawning awareness that he had linked his life to a man who had been a monster.Jonah had gone into the kitchen. Clarkson could hear the muffled, domestic sounds of him brewing tea—the kettle click, a china cup clinking. It was the noise of a life he no longer k

  • Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love   Chapter 190. The Ghost of the Past

    The crumpled transcript lay between them on the low table, a silent accusator. The penthouse, once an oasis, became a confessional. Jonah's unyielding loyalty had been armor, but Clarkson knew that armor was not forgiveness. Harper had set the ghost free, but the ghost belonged to him. The sin belonged to him. To stand united in truth, the darkness needed to be his to share, not Harper's to control.It wasn't business," Clarkson breathed softly, his voice raspy. He turned his back to Jonah, resting against the window sill, and couldn't meet his eye while exhuming this particular corpse. "What I told you. That was the censored version. The version I've told myself for twenty years.".He heard the soft creak as Jonah leaned further into the sofa, a soft sign that he was listening. Not as a judge, but as a witness. It was all the encouragement Clarkson needed."Silas Coombes… he wasn't just a rival," Clarkson began, the name tasting like poison on his tongue. "He was a friend.". Or as cl

  • Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love   Chapter 189. Harper's Last Sting

    The tranquility was fleeting. One quiet day, a fragile bubble of peace in the penthouse, insulated from the fiscal wreckage and public humiliation. They had spent it in virtual quiet, hardly a word spoken, just re-learning the contours of each other's presence. The world, however, had not finished with them.It arrived not with a headline shout, but a whisper. An plain, unsealed envelope, brought by a delivery man who had materialized and vanished so quickly he was hardly seen. On the penthouse welcome mat, a white square of pure malevolence. Robert Clarkson's hand trembled over it, his stomach already a cold knot of fear. He knew, with a sense of foreboding like a death warrant, who it was from.There was nothing written on the inside. No message. Just one, solitary, typewritten page—a transcript—and a black-and-white, grainy photograph.The photograph showed a twenty-years-younger Robert Clarkson, his face unlined by the troubles of an empire, his hair more substantial. He was shaki

  • Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love    Chapter 188. Jonah's Support

    The penthouse was still more quiet now. The frenzied intensity of public madness had passed, leaving only the empty, echoing silence of what followed. The financial news station was off, the yelling headlines relegated to the fringes. The light fell only from a single lamp, casting a warm, intimate pool in the vast living room, a tiny sanctuary against the cold indifference of the city. Robert Clarkson sat on the couch, looking at nothing. The detachment he felt as he saw the numbers fall away was replaced by a numbing tiredness that crept into his bones. He was a general surveying a lost field after a defeat he had engineered willingly.The toll, now totaled, was enormous.The empire that he had created, the reputation that he had built—it was gone, a hollow husk smoldering on the books of the Stock Exchange.A lifetime of labor, destroyed in an hour of frenzied headlines.He felt the warmth beside him. He had not noticed Jonah approach, but he felt the cushion dip, the accustomed wa

  • Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love   Chapter 187. The Public Frenzy

    The storm broke at dawn, and it was not made up of rain, but of ink. The tightly managed press release from Clarkson Industries, announcing the "historic strategic partnership with the Magnus Institute," was a lit match tossed into a container of petrol. Public conversation, so recently focused on Harper's death, whiplashed with a brutal, public whiplash.Not just critical, the headlines were apoplectic."MAGNUS MADNESS: CLARKSON SEALS OCCULT BOND!" The Chronicle screamed, Pendleton's byline a flashback to the fewer and farther-between friends of Harper, seizing their moment for payback."FROM BOARDROOM TO SÉANCE: SHAMED CEO ADOPTS THE ABYSS," The Financial Times blared, its usually placid pages now hosting an almost frenetic op-ed. The tawdrier the papers became unhinged. "LOVE SPELL? CLARKSON GAVE KEYS TO MYSTIC FLAME!" screamed one, over a blurry, uncomplimentary photo of Jonah departing the Institute, collar turned up against the cold. The airwaves were clogged with the same bedla

  • Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love   Chapter 186. Trust Reborn

    The town beneath them had subsided into the deep, watchful quiet of the early hours. The day's tense hurry had drained off, leaving nothing but the muffled, black universe and the sphere of golden lamplight that rounded them on the floor before the window. They had not moved for a very long time, content in the unambiguous, animal lexicon of touch—shoulders wedged hard against each other, Clarkson's arm around Jonah, Jonah's head a comforting weight against his shoulders.It was Jonah who talked, his crass-tongued voice crasser still from neglect and drained feeling, barely a murmur against the quiet."You risked something by doing that."It wasn't an accusation. It was a note of astonishment, a measuring of the distance he'd just witnessed Clarkson leap. Clarkson's hand, which had rested on Jonah's arm, clenched. "There was nothing to risk," he said, his voice low and sure. "Not without you. It was all just… noise. Empty rooms." Jonah shifted, his head coming up to lock his eyes with

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