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Chapter 79: Fall of a Tycoon
Last Updated:
2025-04-28 09:52:38
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My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 80: Red ink
The morning after our nonprofit’s official launch party — a modest, unpolished affair filled with fold-out chairs, lukewarm coffee, and people who’d been bruised but not broken — I woke to the sound of Callum whispering into the phone on our apartment balcony.His voice was low but urgent, the kind of tone that pulls you out of sleep and into instinct.I slipped out of bed and padded toward him. He didn’t hear me until I was nearly at the door.“No, I understand,” he was saying. “But if she’s willing to come forward, I’ll fly out myself. No press. No exposure. Just us.”A pause. Then: “Yes. I’ll protect her. I promise.”When he turned and saw me, he didn’t flinch or scramble to hang up. He just nodded at whoever was on the other end and said, “I’ll be in touch.” Then ended the call."Another whistleblower?" I asked, arms folded across my chest, shielding myself from the early spring chill.Callum nodded, rubbing his jaw. “She worked in one of the offshore facilities. Environmental vio
Last Updated : 2025-04-29My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 81: Why now?
Julian Marek entered like a man who’d made peace with the fact that he’d never truly be safe again. He moved with practiced restraint, eyes scanning the modest room we called our office — part war room, part sanctuary — as if memorizing every possible exit.He sat only when Callum nodded toward the chair opposite our battered wooden desk. I stayed standing, my arms folded, watching Julian as he placed the flash drive carefully on the desk, like it was made of glass or guilt.“This isn’t everything,” he said, nodding to the device. “But it’s enough. Enough to start a fire Rhodes can’t put out.”Callum leaned forward, his tone careful. “Why now?”Julian let out a breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Because I saw what you did with Elena Cruz. The way you didn’t sensationalize her story. You didn’t make her another headline. You protected her.”He glanced at me then, eyes sharp. “That matters.”“Where did you get this?” I asked.Julian’s jaw tightened. “Let’s just say not everyone i
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We touched down in Muscat under assumed names.The drive inland took six hours — through scrublands and past oil refineries that belched smoke into a bronze sky. Will’s laptop buzzed every hour, cycling through spoofed IPs as he monitored surveillance chatter. No mention of us yet. But silence didn’t mean safety. It just meant the wolves hadn’t sniffed us out — yet.The facility was buried near a former desalination plant, abandoned after a funding scandal gutted the region’s infrastructure grants. Now, according to the blueprints Elena had smuggled out, it was the outer shell for something darker — an underground research complex, sealed and scorched clean of any official record.We stopped ten kilometers out and continued on foot.The air was hot, dry, and tasted faintly of rust.Will led, scanning with a thermal imager hooked into his glasses. “There’s something under us,” he murmured after an hour of hiking, pointing toward a ridge.“Ventilation shafts,” Callum said, checking the
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We disappeared again.After the collapse of the Gulf site, we scattered — not out of fear, but necessity. The storm was here, and its winds were erratic. Some of us went deep underground. Others surfaced in plain sight, shielded by the sheer power of exposure. But none of us stayed still.Will went dark first. He dumped the remaining drives with five trusted allies — digital custodians who mirrored the data across anonymized networks. Then he vanished. No signal, no trace.Callum and I relocated to Berlin. It was noisy enough to be invisible, paranoid enough to be safe. Elena joined us three weeks later, still weak, but burning with focus. She had changed in the black room. There was a sharpness to her now — like metal hardened by fire.The world outside roared louder each day.The “Recursive Ethics Protocols” leaked across more than 120 news outlets. Some tried to discredit them, spinning tales of synthetic forgeries or “AI-generated disinformation.” But forensic analysts — the good
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We lay low in Prague.After the Horizon Gaze breach, the world felt thinner — like the distance between reality and illusion had collapsed. Will’s virus was still compiling, Elena had vanished into the underweb to work her channels, and the drive we stole was secured in a modified Faraday crate beneath three feet of reinforced concrete.The fight wasn’t over — it never really was — but for the first time in months, we had a moment to breathe.And it was in that breath that something broke open.It started simple.Callum and I shared a small flat above a shuttered jazz bar, the kind of place that smelled like old wood and rain. The windows overlooked a narrow cobbled street, always damp and glowing with soft amber lights from a broken lantern across the way.We didn’t speak much those first two days. We didn’t need to. Silence had become our currency — quiet glances, shared coffee, his steady presence beside me as I sifted through surveillance dumps and predictive scripts.But the sile
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Berlin had gone quiet.After the virus launched, there was a lull — not peace, exactly, but the kind of stillness that follows a tectonic shift. Protestors were still in the streets, headlines still spun, and Novus Shield’s remnants were scrambling to erase their fingerprints. But for us, it was waiting time.Will was off-grid chasing down a suspected mole. Elena was silent again — not unusual, but it gnawed at me all the same. And Callum…Callum was perfect.Too perfect.He brewed my coffee exactly the way I liked it. He woke up before me, padded around barefoot, bare-chested, humming some song I didn’t recognize. He kissed me like we had all the time in the world. And when I had nightmares — and I still did — he held me until they stopped mattering.That’s what made it worse.The message came in through an old comms relay we hadn’t used since Prague — a secure terminal we’d buried beneath three encryption layers and a rotating cipher. It shouldn’t have been active.I found it by acc
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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
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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
