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When The Face Looks Back

Author: Avery Grey
last update Last Updated: 2025-10-20 04:44:07

The room was a pressure cooker that had finally had the weight valve opened. The image of Alexander Kingstone’s face in the passenger seat hovered on Jonah’s screen like a thing that would not be exhaled. For a long, terrible second nobody spoke. Air seemed to congeal.

“Elena,” Damian said finally, and it was not a question. His voice had gone thin with something like grief and a brittle, raw anger. He always sounded decisive — the way he carried himself, the way people listened when he gave an order — but in that moment the usual control had cracked. He reached across, took her hand, and the contact was quiet, intimate, urgent.

She felt his fingers the way someone feels a lighthouse through fog: a steadying point she could reach for. “I saw him,” she whispered, though everyone had seen him. “That’s him.”

Victoria’s voice cut in, sharp and precise, the kind of voice that organizes panic into action. “We do not say more publicly than necessary,” she said. “We need to verify, secure, an
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  • Married to the billionaire by contract    The Choice Between Two Freedoms

    “You owe me nothing.”“No,” Damian said. He was standing in the center of a small room that smelled faintly of lemon polish and paper—Beatrice’s office, the one with the low couch where they had once argued about indemnity clauses and later sat in silence together. “I owe you everything.”Elena pressed her palm flat against the desk, feeling the grain under her fingers. She could see the man he had been—the suit, the lean lines, the boardroom posture—but she could also see the man he was trying to be: tired, raw, focused. His gray eyes had lost their business-cold sheen and gained something softer. “You could give the apology to the wind and it would still be nothing,” she said. “Words don’t fix bones, Damian.”He swallowed. “No. They don’t. But I have been trying to fix what I can. I—” He stopped, as if the sentence might break into a thousand jagged pieces if he finished it. He breathed and forced the rest out like a negotiation. “I have resigned from the company. I have put my name

  • Married to the billionaire by contract    The Name Between Breath And Breath

    “You heard that,” Jonah said, voice barely louder than the hum of the AC, like he was afraid to wake the dead or start the tabloids. He kept his eyes on his laptop, fingers poised as if the keys might run away. Jonah’s face had that always-curious, all-night-obsessed look he wore when code became a mystery to solve; it made his bright eyes look younger than he was.“I heard it,” Elena said. Her voice was small, and it surprised her how small it felt in the middle of a room full of professionals. She rubbed the heel of her hand into her palm like it might keep her steady. The hand felt the weight of the small scar near her thumb — a memory of patient rooms and too-bright hallway lights — and she clung to it as if the skin itself could anchor her.Damian didn’t let go of her hand. That had become their private thing: he would take her hand and hold it in the middle of chaos. He had a way of covering her fingers with his that made complicated decisions feel suddenly simpler, as if he cou

  • Married to the billionaire by contract    When The Face Looks Back

    The room was a pressure cooker that had finally had the weight valve opened. The image of Alexander Kingstone’s face in the passenger seat hovered on Jonah’s screen like a thing that would not be exhaled. For a long, terrible second nobody spoke. Air seemed to congeal.“Elena,” Damian said finally, and it was not a question. His voice had gone thin with something like grief and a brittle, raw anger. He always sounded decisive — the way he carried himself, the way people listened when he gave an order — but in that moment the usual control had cracked. He reached across, took her hand, and the contact was quiet, intimate, urgent.She felt his fingers the way someone feels a lighthouse through fog: a steadying point she could reach for. “I saw him,” she whispered, though everyone had seen him. “That’s him.”Victoria’s voice cut in, sharp and precise, the kind of voice that organizes panic into action. “We do not say more publicly than necessary,” she said. “We need to verify, secure, an

  • Married to the billionaire by contract    The Upload

    They crowded around Jonah’s laptop like a handful of desperate witnesses, each person’s reflection caught in the glossy screen as if the room itself were part of the evidence. The live stream window pulsed, green upload bars creeping across a dark background with the impersonal methodical patience of bad news.“It’s seeding through multiple nodes now,” Jonah said, voice stripped of anything other than facts. He kept his fingers moving, not pausing long enough to let panic take root. His glasses were slightly crooked from too many hours bent over screens; there was a thin line of fatigue under his eyes that made him look younger and infinitely more raw than usual. “I’ve got a trace on several mirror hosts. They’re decentralized—someone’s using a chain to keep it alive.”Beatrice’s hands were in motion even as she watched. She had that particular assertive energy that organized chaos into tasks; the curl of hair at her temple refused to lie flat no matter how many times she pinned it. “

  • Married to the billionaire by contract    Lines In The Sand

    The newsroom glow in the lobby felt like a bruise: bright, intrusive, impossible to ignore. Elena kept her hand tucked into Damian’s sleeve like a child’s anchor as they navigated the flow of people who already had opinions and questions on their faces. Cameras that hadn’t been there in the morning gathered like hungry moths; flashes popped and died in quick bursts that made Elena’s head spin. Every lens felt like a judgement.“Stay close,” Damian murmured in a tone that was both instruction and comfort. He moved with that practiced calm that made employees fall into step around him, and for a second Elena took the comfort like a remedy. His presence was a steadying line she could lean against.They reached the inner office where Victoria had taken command. Her blazer was perfectly pressed, her voice disciplined. “We’ll do a brief statement, two lines,” she said before they could sit. “We acknowledge an inquiry. We do not speculate. Anything beyond that goes to counsel.”Beatrice flit

  • Married to the billionaire by contract    Afterimage

    Elena sat very still, like a photograph that people forgot to pick up and put back in the album. Her fingers rested on the paper cup and the cup left a faint sweat ring on the table. The conference room around them had gone from a machine of motion to a small island of people holding their breaths. She could hear her own pulse as if it were a voice in the room.“What do we know so far?” Damian asked. His voice was low and steady, the kind of voice that had always made people listen. Even now, with the weight of what they’d just seen, he sounded like the man who could catalogue a problem into pieces and fix them in order. He folded his long hands in front of him and didn’t look away from Elena as he spoke.Beatrice was first to answer. She had the habit of cutting to the bone — practical, exact. “We have a fragment of footage that appears to show a Kingstone Logistics logo on a vehicle involved in the crash,” she said. “The clip’s been mirrored to multiple servers. It’s incomplete, but

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