Se connecterPartager
Brennan
Date de publication:
2026-10-21 18:20:03
Dernier chapitre
His Beautiful Deception The Alert
Alexander's POV The alert had come through at 1:52 in the morning. I was awake. I was always awake at that hour, sitting on the leather sofa in the corner of my office with the lights off and a legal pad on my knee, the city glittering silently beyond the glass. I had a habit of sleeping in the building two or three nights a week. It was not something I discussed. My phone lit up on the arm of the sofa. SECURITY NOTICE. Unauthorized query, restricted directory: R.P. – PERSONAL. User: A. SINCLAIR. Workstation: 9F-ANNEX. Access denied. I read it twice. I did not move. For a long time I sat with the phone in my hand, staring at the small glowing letters, and felt the room grow very cold. R.P. It was my father's folder. I had created it myself, the week he died. I had been twenty-seven years old and hollow with grief, sitting at his desk at three in the morning, sorting through the contents of a life. I had found a locked drawer. I had found a hard drive. I had copied
His Beautiful Deception Too dangerous
Arielle's POV I went back at midnight. I told myself it was only to finish the audit. It was a lie, of course, and a poor one, and I recognized it even as I said it to the sleepy night guard at the front desk. He glanced at my badge, and the small yellow tag that said ANNEX ONLY, and waved me toward the elevator with a yawn. "Working late again, miss?" "Deadline." "Don't they ever let you go home?" "Not lately." He chuckled. The elevator doors closed. The ninth floor was a dark, hushed cavern. The fluorescents had switched themselves off at ten, leaving only a low blue glow from the emergency lights along the ceiling. My footsteps echoed on the carpet. The whole building seemed to be breathing, slow and quiet, the way a sleeping animal breathes. I let myself into the annex and locked the door behind me. The room was as I had left it. Boxes stacked in neat columns. Papers in careful piles. The folding table with my laptop, where a single lamp still burned. I sat
His Beautiful Deception The loop
Arielle's POV For three days I did nothing but read paper. It was the only thing that quieted my mind. When I closed my eyes I saw the falling steel and heard the shriek of the hook. When I opened them I saw the small purple bruise on my jaw in the mirror, and felt Alexander's hand on my cheek. So I stopped looking at anything but invoices. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the ninth-floor annex, surrounded by boxes of originals that Daniel had delivered without comment, and I read every page. It was slow, dull, tedious work. I loved it. There is a peace in paper. A delivery slip does not lie the way a person does. It says what it says, in the ink and stamp and signature of the moment. If you look long enough, the falsehoods rise to the surface like oil on water. By Thursday afternoon I had a system. Red tabs for forged signatures. Yellow for altered dates. Blue for anything that looked like it had been touched by a hand other than the one that made it. There were forty-o
His Beautiful Deception Brennan
Alexander's POV The hook had not failed. It had been sabotaged. The forensic engineer, a stooped, pale man named Hollis, laid the evidence on my desk at seven the next morning, in a plastic bag, like a diagnosis. It was a small, ugly piece of steel, the latch pin from the crane's hook block. The end was clean and bright. "Filed," he said. "Not broken. Someone cut most of the way through it with a hand file. You see the parallel marks? Then they reassembled the pin. It would have held under a light load. Under a heavy one, at a particular angle..." He made a small gesture with his hand. A falling motion. "How long would it take?" "Ten minutes, if you knew the mechanism." "Who would know?" "Anyone who'd worked on that model." "Or someone who was told." "That, too." I looked at the small piece of steel. It gleamed under the desk lamp. There was a strange stillness in the room, the kind that comes just before a storm. Daniel stood beside the window with his tablet,
His Beautiful Deception What he does when no one is watching
Arielle's POV The emergency room smelled of antiseptic and burned coffee. A nurse with tired eyes and a kind face had put me on a narrow bed behind a curtain and taken my pulse, shone a light in my eyes, and pressed her fingers along every rib. I had a bruised hip, a scraped elbow, and dust in places I would not have believed. Nothing more. "You're very lucky," she said. "Really lucky." "Whoever knocked you out of the way has a good sense of timing." "He does" I smiled "Is he your husband?" "No." "Boyfriend?" "No." I looked at my scraped hand. "He's my client." The nurse's eyebrows rose. She was, to her credit, too polite to say anything. She left. The curtain swayed. I sat there, listening to the murmur of the ward, the beep of machines, a child crying somewhere down the hall. My whole body was starting to shake now that the adrenaline was leaving. It was a slow, ugly tremor that began in my knees and worked its way up. I had nearly died. I said it to my
His Beautiful Deception The hook
Alexander's POV It happened at ten past two in the afternoon. I remember the exact time because I was looking at my watch. I had just come out of the site office with Marcus and two engineers, arguing about a delivery schedule, and I glanced at my wrist to see how late I was for a call with the bank. It was a small, ordinary movement. Then I heard the sound. It was a high, metallic shriek, like something enormous tearing in half. It rose from the far side of the east wing. Every head on the site turned at once. I saw Marcus go rigid. "That's the tower crane," he said. I was already running. The crane stood a hundred and twenty feet tall, a steel giant with a long horizontal arm, and it had been lifting a bundle of reinforcing bars toward the third floor of the east wing. A ton and a half of steel, strapped in a sling. It hung against the pale sky. Then the hook let go. It happened in absolute silence, or so it seemed. There was no shout, no warning. The bundle simp
Vous vous intéresseriez aussi à
I Kissed A CEO And He Liked It!
LiLhyz1.5M VuesSpoiled by Mr. Russell
Luminous Night1.0M VuesChasing My Pregnant Wife
Night Revelations979.6K VuesThe Wrong Woman
Ginny Not Genie1.2M VuesFalling For My Father’s Bestfriend; A Slow Burn Romance
Latifat165 VuesLet Me Go Ex Husband
Solene113 VuesMARRIED TO MY FIANCÉ’S HOCKEY PLAYER BROTHER
Starlyn Wilder225 VuesApril Fools : My Husband Gave Me to His Best Friend
Major_Canis279 Vues
