Mag-log inShare
Chapter 66: His Choice
Huling Na-update:
2025-04-16 16:26:33
Kaugnay na kabanata
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 67: Come back
He stepped closer, not touching me, not demanding anything—just close enough that I could feel the heat of him in the chilled wind.“You’ll find her,” he said softly. “I know you will.”His voice was full of something reverent. Like belief. Like hope. Like he saw a version of me I hadn’t fully stepped into yet but he already loved anyway.We stood there like that for a while, the waves crashing far below, the clouds slowly drifting across a sky painted with late afternoon gold. And then I did something I hadn’t planned.I reached for his hand.It felt like stepping off a ledge—but instead of falling, I found solid ground.His fingers threaded with mine instinctively. Familiar. Easy. And when I looked up at him, something shifted. Deep and quiet and real.“Come back with me,” I said.His brows lifted slightly, surprise flickering behind his eyes.“Just for tea,” I added quickly. “Don’t make it weird.”He grinned, and for a moment, we weren’t two broken people trying to figure out how t
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-17My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 68: Struggle
The storm between us quieted.He didn’t say anything else for a while, and neither did I. The only sounds were our breathing and the tick of the wall clock, each second reminding me that peace like this wasn’t promised—it was chosen, earned, fragile.Callum's fingers curled around mine slowly, deliberately. A silent act of truce.I leaned into his shoulder, resting my forehead against the curve of his neck. He smelled like sun-warmed cotton and faint traces of my lavender soap. I’d missed this. Not just the feel of him—but the safety of him. The softness that still existed beneath the sharp edges life had carved into both of us.“I didn’t mean to ruin this morning,” I murmured.He sighed. “I know.”We sat like that for minutes or maybe hours—it was hard to tell. The past still hummed in the corners of the room, but something new was blooming too. Fragile, but real.Eventually, he spoke again. “What if this doesn’t work out?”I pulled back slightly. “Us?”“No,” he said, shaking his hea
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-18My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 69: Whisper
The day Ryan whispered my name was the same day the sun finally broke through a week of gray clouds. I stood at the hospital window, watching light spill over the parking lot like a quiet promise, while inside, my brother blinked slowly at me, his lips dry, cracked—but alive.“You came back,” I murmured, tears gathering fast.His throat worked, but he couldn’t say much else yet. Still, it was enough. That one word—my name—was everything. And when I held his hand this time, I could feel the strength slowly returning beneath the fragile skin.I sent a voice message to Callum. I didn’t trust myself to talk without sobbing. “He said my name,” I whispered. “Callum, he said my name.”He called me back immediately, and when I answered, I could hear it in his voice—he’d stopped whatever he was doing. “I’m on my way.”“No,” I said quickly, though my heart clenched at the thought. “You have work.”“Screw work. I told you, I’m in this. I’ll catch the next flight. Just… stay with him. I’ll be the
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-20My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 70: Daniel
Athena’s POVI should’ve known peace never lasts.It had been a year since Ryan whispered my name in that hospital bed. A year since Callum came back into my life and refused to leave. A year of healing, slow mornings by the water, shared laughter over burnt pancakes, and kisses that melted every last memory of heartbreak.We had a rhythm now. A life. Something we didn’t dare imagine before.But I should’ve known that the past has a habit of clawing its way back. Especially when it’s wearing a three-piece suit and a smile that never quite reaches his eyes.His name is Daniel Grant.And once upon a time, he was the man I almost married.—The first time I saw him again, it was like my lungs forgot how to breathe.I was in town, picking up fresh flowers for the little café table Callum and I had dragged home from a garage sale. It was a small thing, but it made breakfast feel like something sacred.The florist was tying twine around a bouquet of wildflowers when I heard his voice.“Athe
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-21My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 71: Crossing the line
The first time I found the photo, I thought it was a mistake.It was tucked into my coat pocket—an old picture of me and Daniel at his sister’s wedding. My dress was too tight, his tie was crooked, and we were laughing like the world didn’t know how to hurt us yet. I hadn’t seen that picture in years. I didn’t even remember it being taken.But Daniel did.He was making a point. This wasn’t about nostalgia.It was about control.I burned the photo in the sink that night. Watched the edges curl and blacken like the past finally giving up.Callum stood behind me, silent, his hand resting at the small of my back.“He’s crossing lines,” he said.“I know.”“We should call someone.”I turned. “What would we even say? ‘My ex is acting weird and persistent’?”Callum’s jaw clenched. “He’s not just being persistent. He’s stalking.”I exhaled shakily. “Then we gather proof. We do it smart. He wants a reaction. I won’t give him one.”But I felt it. That old, familiar fear, creeping in like a draft
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-22My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 72: Real love
It was a Tuesday when I realized Daniel hadn’t stopped—he had simply changed tactics.The gifts started small. A bouquet of roses on the hood of my car, no card. A song request on the local radio station—our old song, of course—dedicated to “the one who got away.” A flash drive in the mail containing nothing but footage of us from years ago. Silent videos. Muted laughter. Kisses preserved in pixels like relics from a war only one of us was still fighting.He wanted me to remember, but all he did was remind me why I left.The police were sympathetic, but careful. “Until he breaks the order, we can’t make a move,” they said. But Callum’s friend, Miles, was less restrained.“He’s escalating again,” Miles told me one night over coffee and code. “You’re his fixation. He doesn’t care if he gets caught—he just wants you to see him.”“And if I won’t?” I asked, already knowing.Miles leaned back, lips tight. “Then he’ll try to make you.”—It was the podcast that changed everything.I hadn’t p
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-23My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 73: It was over
We thought it was over.The trial. The sentence. The fire pit where we burned his letter. We thought that would be the end of Daniel's reach—that prison bars could hold obsession the way they hold people.We were wrong.Because Daniel didn’t want me back. Not really. He wanted to destroy the version of me that lived without him.He wanted to ruin what he couldn’t own.He started small again—he always did. A new Instagram profile that followed both me and Callum, no posts, no bio. Just a name I recognized from a story we once told together. A callback, like an inside joke only we would get.I blocked it. Thought that would be the end of it.Then Callum started getting emails.At first, they were harmless. Vague phrases like, “Do you really know who she is?” or “Ask her what she isn’t telling you.”Spam folder stuff. Cowardly.But then came the photos.Old ones of me and Daniel. Ones I never remembered being taken. Private ones. Intimate. A weaponized version of nostalgia designed to tw
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-24My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 74: Richard Rhodes
The sky outside the kitchen window was a dull, overcast gray—clouds sagging like they carried secrets too heavy to keep. I stood by the sink, phone in hand, staring at the message I’d read over and over again.“I need to speak with you. Today. In person. – Richard Rhodes.”The name alone sent a knot curling in my stomach. Richard Rhodes—father of the late Emilia Rhodes, ruthless tycoon of Rhodes Industries, and the man who made sure I lost my job the moment my relationship with Callum went public. He’d always been a shadow in the distance. Now he was calling me into the light.I didn’t tell Mom or Ryan about the message. My mother was folding laundry in the living room, humming an old tune under her breath. My brother Ryan was sprawled on the couch, eyes glued to his phone, earbuds in. Peaceful. Ordinary.I didn’t want to worry them. Not when things were already tight. I’d been unemployed for weeks. The severance package had been insulting, and my name had been quietly dragged through
Huling Na-update : 2025-04-25
Pinakabagong kabanata
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 95: Trigger
The snow came in thick that morning.It blanketed the ridge in silence, muting the world until everything beyond the windows blurred into shades of white and grey. Callum stood outside, barely a silhouette against the swirling flakes, wrapped in that old green coat he found in the closet and claimed as his own. I watched him through the frost-laced glass, my hands cupped around the ceramic mug—his coffee, still bitter, still undrinkable.But I sipped it anyway.Because he’d made it for me. Because the effort mattered more than the taste.I opened the door slowly. The cold slapped my skin, immediate and bracing.“Morning,” I called.He turned slightly, his breath visible in short puffs. “Didn’t want to wake you.”“You didn’t.” I stepped beside him. “You okay?”His jaw tensed. “I’m… almost.”I waited. We’d fallen into a rhythm like that—one of pauses and offerings. No pressure. Just space, held gently.He finally said, “I dreamed I was back in the vault. But this time, I walked in willi
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 94: Shut down
The safehouse in the Scottish Highlands didn’t look like much—half-buried in moss and stone, tucked beneath a crooked ridge. But after what we’d been through, it felt like the world’s last cathedral. Quiet. Empty. Untouched by programs and wires and memories that weren’t ours.Callum barely spoke the first day. He slept. For once, real sleep—not the restless, drug-induced recovery that followed every mission. I watched him from the armchair across the room, wrapped in the heavy plaid blanket someone had left behind, eyes tracking the rise and fall of his chest as if I still didn’t quite believe he was breathing freely.I wanted to reach for him. But after Reykjavik, after the screaming and seizures and crimson light inside that vault—I was afraid of shattering something fragile. Not him. Us.So I waited.On the third night, the fireplace crackled back to life, and so did he.“You should sleep,” Callum murmured from where he stood by the window, arms crossed loosely over his chest. “I
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 93: Memory
The corridors beneath Reykjavik were colder than death. The walls hummed faintly with latent energy — the kind that made your skin crawl, like the building itself remembered violence.We’d split into two groups. Julian and Will were planting the disruptor arrays across the upper levels. Sage was syncing the transport failsafe. I stayed with Callum.He was quiet beside me, moving slowly but steady, hand trailing lightly against the steel walls like he needed to touch something real. The tremors in his body had lessened, but I could still see the fatigue in his eyes.“Pain okay?” I asked, adjusting my grip on the rifle slung across my shoulder.He gave me a faint smile. “Manageable. I’ve had worse.”That much was true — but it wasn’t his body I worried about. It was what they had done to his mind. What they had put inside him.We reached a chamber lit only by our headlamps. The walls narrowed here, funnelling down into the main vault. The Eidolon core was just beyond.Callum paused at t
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 92: Reclaim
The chopper thumped across the burning skyline like a bleeding heartbeat, rhythmic and urgent. I sat beside Callum, cradling him against my side, his blood soaking through my sleeves. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, and every time his eyes fluttered open, I reminded him, “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”Julian sat across from us, checking a battered tablet that had somehow survived the inferno. The glow on his face was pale and grim.“We didn’t get it all,” he muttered. “Their central servers were offline before we reached the lab. Everything in Callum’s head may be the last uncorrupted copy.”Will glanced over his shoulder from the cockpit, voice tense. “And now they know that. Which means we’ve got a target painted on our backs the size of a continent.”I turned my head, looking back at the black column of smoke curling into the sky. Calidus wouldn’t mourn the loss. They didn’t grieve — they adapted. A fallen lab was just another lesson. A reminder to harden the next one.B
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 91: The Fire we bring
He looked at me like a dying man trying to remember sunlight.The flickering fluorescent light above cast shadows across his face, deepening the hollow beneath his cheekbones, making the bruises bloom darker on his skin. I reached out, but he flinched.“Callum,” I said again, gentler this time. “I know what they’ve done. I see it. But they don’t get to keep you.”He swallowed, and the sound felt deafening in the silence. “You don’t know what I’ve given them, Athena. What I had to give.”Julian appeared behind me, scanning the room with his weapon drawn, tense and ready. “We need to move. This place won’t stay quiet for long.”I looked back at Callum, still shackled to the cot. “We can’t leave him like this.”“There’s no time,” Will’s voice crackled through my comm. “Guards converging. Eastern hallway. You’ve got five minutes, max.”I turned to Julian. “Cut him loose.”Julian hesitated only a second before crossing the room. “He’ll slow us down.”“Then we’ll move slower,” I snapped.Ca
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 90: He's Alive
And he was trying to reach me.“I thought he died,” Will said, hands trembling as he decrypted the next packet.“He was supposed to,” I whispered. “He wanted us to believe it.”Julian joined us ten minutes later, still bruised but sharper than ever. He scanned the metadata twice before nodding.“This wasn’t sent from the convoy,” he said. “It came from inside the Calidus fallback grid. Probably rerouted through a relay station using a clean identity.”“So he’s behind enemy lines,” I said.“Or being kept alive by someone with an interest in not killing him.”“Leverage,” Will said. “Or… bait.”The thought made my stomach clench.“Either way,” Julian added, “he sent this for a reason. He’s telling you he made it. That he’s waiting.”I looked at the screen again.Echo. Down. Survived.Not help. Not run. Not goodbye.Just three words.A signal in the dark.We flew to Montenegro the next day.Julian tracked the signal’s bounce path to a portside comms hub buried in a crumbling Cold War-era
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 89: Bring him home
Three days had passed since Will told me Callum was dead.Three days since the convoy firestorm — since the smoke, the silence, and the sound of nothing on the other end of the line. We buried his name in an encrypted memorial on the darknet, posted beneath a single phrase: Some ghosts burn brighter than the living.The world kept moving.The children were safe — scattered across hidden sanctuaries with new identities and guardians who still believed in justice. Nora-3 was adapting faster than we thought possible. Her neural scans had begun to normalize, as if freedom was rewriting her brain.But me?I was static.Functioning. Breathing. Moving.But not feeling.Not really.Until the ping.It came through Will’s system at 2:17 a.m. — a ghost packet embedded in a relay node we’d used back in Prague, long since scrubbed and mothballed.I was the one who saw it.The days were a blur of comms and half-formed plans. Every hour that passed with Callum’s message sitting like a hot ember in m
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 88: Feel empty
There’s a kind of silence that doesn’t feel empty.The kind that wraps around you after a moment so sharp, so unforgiving, that your brain hasn’t caught up yet. Like the second after a gunshot, or the pause before someone says, “It’s not what you think.”I sat in that silence, staring at the message on Callum’s encrypted tablet.It had lit up when he stepped away to take a call — some logistics check-in with Will. He’d left it open. That alone should’ve been a red flag. Callum never left anything unsecured.But maybe… maybe part of him wanted me to see it.The message was from Lara.Lara: The flight from Riyadh is booked. If we do this, there’s no turning back.Below that, a location ping.Not Novus-related. Not a safehouse.A villa. Remote. Coastal. Private.There was a follow-up message, timestamped an hour earlier.Lara: Are you sure about her? You said she’d never find out.And then — the worst part — the reply.Callum: She’s distracted with the child protocols. Let’s finish this
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 87: Not even Callum
I didn’t leave Berlin.Not really.I stayed close enough to watch Callum from a distance — to feel the gravity of him without getting pulled back into orbit. He didn’t chase me. That was worse than if he had. Because it meant he knew I wasn’t ready to hear anything that would make this less real, less raw.I stayed in an old Cold War-era substation the resistance had converted into a shelter for journalists and data couriers. The air smelled like copper and engine oil. The beds were steel slabs with thin foam. It was perfect. Unemotional. Unattached.I needed that right now.Because I couldn’t stop thinking about the messages.Not just the words Lara wrote — but the pauses. The silences in between. The way Callum had answered her, and more damning: the way he hadn’t.He hadn’t denied it meant something.He hadn’t told her to stop.He hadn’t told me the truth.I’d trusted him with my life. With my mind. With my body. And in the end, it was something so simple — a lie by omission — that
