His version

Chapter 9

Marcus's POV

I dropped the phone onto my desk harder than necessary and stared down at the folder before me, the one bearing Joel's neat, irritating letterhead across the top.

Divorce papers. From my own wife.

A short laugh escaped me, dry and humourless, and I dragged a hand down my face, the smell of cologne and stale coffee clinging to my skin from a night that had already stretched far too long before her call about Chloe had interrupted it.

Isabella. Foolish, sentimental Isabella.

I flipped through the pages without truly reading them, my eyes catching only fragments, irreconcilable differences, division of assets, full custody surrendered willingly. My jaw tightened at that last clause. Willingly. As though she believed herself the one walking away with dignity intact.

I leaned back in my chair, the leather creaking beneath me, and let my gaze drift toward the window, toward the city lights blinking indifferently below, each one representing some fool going about a life far smaller than mine.

She would not last a week.

That was the truth of it, plain and simple, however loudly she screamed about betrayal and lies on the telephone tonight. Isabella had never once, in all our years together, survived more than a handful of days without me. She did not know how to. I had built that dependence carefully, patiently, brick by brick, until she could not so much as choose a dress for an event without wondering first whether it would please me.

She was proud now, freshly wounded, drunk on righteous anger. Give her a week. Perhaps two, if her mother's coddling proved particularly effective this time. Then she would come crawling back, as she always did, tears streaking her pretty face, begging to be let back into the only life she had ever truly known how to live.

I dropped the folder onto my desk and reached for my glass, the whisky inside long gone warm and flat, though I drank it anyway, the burn settling low and familiar in my chest.

Let her play at independence. She will learn soon enough what the world looks like without my name attached to hers.

A knock sounded at my office door, sharp and businesslike, and my assistant, Grant, stepped inside without waiting for permission, a tablet clutched against his chest, his expression tight in a way that immediately soured my mood further.

"Sir, forgive the late hour, but I thought you would want to see this before morning." His voice carried the particular strain of a man delivering news he already suspected would not be welcomed.

"What is it now?" I did not bother masking my irritation, swirling the last of the whisky in my glass.

"The Whitfield contract, sir. The one we have been courting for the last three months." He tapped the tablet awake and turned the screen toward me. "Another bidder has entered at the final hour. They have outbid us by a significant margin, and the client is already leaning in their direction."

I sat forward, my earlier amusement curdling instantly into something colder, sharper. That contract represented nearly a quarter of our projected earnings for the year, a deal I had spent months courting personally, flattering old men over expensive dinners, promising delivery timelines I fully intended to squeeze my staff bloodless to meet.

"Who?" I demanded, setting the glass down with enough force that the ice rattled inside it. "Which company has the audacity to move against me at this hour of the night?"

Grant hesitated, and something in that hesitation made the hair along my arms rise before he even answered.

"Hart Corporation, sir."

The name landed in the room like a dropped stone, ripples spreading outward through my chest in ways I could not immediately explain.

Hart Corporation. A name I had not heard spoken aloud in years, buried so deep beneath the life I had built that I had almost convinced myself it belonged to a different lifetime entirely.

"That is impossible." I said it flatly, though my pulse had already begun to climb, a strange, unwelcome heat crawling up the back of my neck. "That company has been dormant for years. Reduced to nothing but old money and older board members too frightened to make a move without permission."

"Not anymore, sir. It appears there has been a change in leadership. Rather recent, from what our contacts could gather. The board went quiet almost overnight, and someone new appears to be pulling every string from behind it." Grant's fingers moved swiftly across the tablet, his brow furrowed in the low light of my office. "We could not get a name. Whoever it is has kept themselves well hidden."

I frowned, turning that piece of information over slowly in my mind, though nothing about it settled comfortably.

"Hart," I muttered again, almost to myself, the syllable catching strangely on my tongue.

It was, coincidentally, the very surname Isabella had once carried before she took mine, back when she was still a nervous young woman claiming to come from nothing, grateful, or so she always insisted, that I had chosen her at all. I had never once thought to question it. Her family had disowned her, she told me, cut her off entirely for choosing a man they considered beneath her. I had assumed, all these years, that whatever remained of that family had long since rotted into irrelevance.

Surely it means nothing. It is a common enough name.

And yet the timing of it, appearing on the very night my wife declared she was finished with me, gnawed at something uneasy in my chest that I could not quite silence.

"Find out who is behind it," I said finally, my voice low, controlled once more, though my fingers had curled tightly around the arm of my chair. "Tonight, if you must. I want a name before the sun rises."

Grant nodded quickly and turned to leave, though he paused at the door, glancing back at me with an expression I did not care for.

"There is one more thing, sir. Our contact at the registry mentioned the new signatory used a name none of them recognized at first, until they cross-checked old shareholder records. Apparently, it matches a name that has not appeared on any Hart Corporation document in nearly a decade."

My stomach tightened, an unwelcome, unfamiliar unease settling low and cold beneath my ribs.

"Whose name?" I asked quietly.

Grant hesitated one final time, his hand resting on the door handle.

"They would not say, sir. Only that it belonged to a daughter the family had long since written out of every record they kept."