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Chapter 23: Marcus Sees Too Much
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-04-19 14:48:03
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One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: WHAT NATHAN STERLING LEFT IN THE SYSTEM
Noah Bennett arrives at the penthouse on a Thursday evening with a laptop, a hard drive, and the particular energy of a man who has spent seventy-two hours inside someone else’s digital infrastructure and has emerged with things that cannot be unseen.He is not what I expected the first time I met him. Sophia described him as a former cybercrime investigator and I built a picture in my head of someone severe and technical and difficult to read. He is actually warm, slightly rumpled, with the kind of face that defaults to humor and switches to focus so completely when it matters that the transition is almost startling. He kisses Sophia on the cheek when she lets him in and then immediately sets the hard drive on the kitchen island and says to the room, “You are not going to like this.”“Tell us anyway,” Lucian says.Noah opens the laptop. “I went into the Blackwood Holdings server logs at Sophia’s request. Standard forensic review, looking for anything that the internal audit would hav
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: THE PHOTOGRAPH THAT REWROTE THE TIMELINE
Ethan and Daniel are already in the penthouse when Lucian gets home.I arranged it from the hospital. Lucian did not know until he walked through the door and found them at the kitchen island with Daniel’s laptop open and Ethan’s files arranged in the particular neat stack that means he has already been working for at least an hour. Lucian looked at the setup and then called me.“You organized this from a hospital bed,” he said.“I was resting,” I said. “Restfully.”He was quiet for a moment.“Dr. Carter is going to revoke your laptop,” he said.“She has to find it first,” I said. “Tell me everything after.”He hangs up. I know because the call drops and then thirty seconds later a text arrives. One word.Insufferable.I take that as affection and go back to Daniel’s preliminary report on my screen.Lucian presents the photograph detail to Ethan and Daniel the way he presents everything that matters, without editorializing, just the facts in sequence. The folder on Gabriel’s assistant
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: GABRIEL KANE MAKES A HOUSE CALL
Lucian leaves the hospital at nine the next morning.Not because he wants to. Because I tell him to, and because Dr. Carter tells him to, and because between the two of us we represent a combined force of persuasion that even Lucian Blackwood cannot comfortably resist. He has a meeting that cannot be moved, a call with the compliance team about Nathan Sterling that Daniel arranged and that Ethan says needs to happen before end of week, and a company that is still running despite everything trying to slow it down.He leaves with his jacket over his arm and his phone already in his hand and he pauses at the door of the room and looks back at me in the bed with my breakfast tray and my laptop that Dr. Carter has not technically forbidden and says, "No working.""I'm reading," I say."What are you reading," he says.I show him the cover of the novel Olivia brought last night along with a change of clothes and three things from the kitchen I did not ask for but apparently needed. He looks
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE SECRET THAT WAS NEVER JUST HERS
Dr. Carter is already in the examination bay when we arrive.I do not know how that is possible. I did not call ahead. I did not have Olivia call ahead. But she is there, in her white coat with her notepad and her direct, unhurried expression, and she looks at me and then at Lucian beside me and then back at me with the particular look of a woman who has been expecting this visit and is unsurprised only by the timing.“Mrs. Blackwood,” she says. “Sit down.”I sit on the edge of the examination table. Lucian stands beside it. He has not let go of my hand since the cab and he does not let go of it now, which I know Dr. Carter registers because she registers everything, but she does not comment on it.She checks my blood pressure first. Then my pulse. She asks me questions in the brisk, methodical way she has, and I answer them honestly because I am past the point of managing what I tell her. Skipped meals. Disrupted sleep. The dizziness in the board meeting corridor two weeks ago. Today
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER TWENTY: THE COLLAPSE SHE CAN’T HIDE ANYMORE
The strategy meeting is at two.It is the kind of meeting that under normal circumstances I would have run without difficulty, twelve people in the Blackwood Holdings main conference room, acquisition timelines, media response framework, the quarterly risk assessment that Marcus insists on regardless of what else is happening because Marcus believes that structure is what keeps things from becoming chaos and he is not wrong.I arrive at one fifty with my notes and my coffee and the particular focus I have been using as a load-bearing wall for three weeks, the professional version of myself that does not flinch and does not stumble and gives the room exactly what it needs for as long as it needs it.I take my seat. The meeting starts. I present the first section of the risk assessment and the numbers hold and the questions are answerable and for forty minutes everything is exactly as it should be.Then the room tilts.Not dramatically. Not the way it tilts in films, not a sudden lurch
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend CHAPTER NINETEEN: WHAT ISABELLA SAID WHEN NO ONE WAS LISTENING
I do not tell Lucian about the meeting.Not immediately. Not because I am keeping it from him, but because I need to understand what Isabella said before I hand it to anyone else, and the only way to do that is to sit with it in the quiet of my own head without other people’s reactions filling up the space where my thinking needs to happen.I text her the morning after the Evelyn lunch.I want to meet. Just us. No lawyers, no buffer, somewhere we won’t be recognized.She takes forty minutes to respond. I spend those forty minutes not watching my phone, which is to say I spend them watching my phone.Her answer is a coffee shop name and a time. Thursday at eleven. A place in the West Village that I have never been to and she apparently knows well enough to choose without deliberation, which tells me something about where she goes when she wants to be left alone.I take a cab. I wear sunglasses I do not usually wear. I arrive two minutes early and find a corner table with my back to the
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 36: When Ethan Starts Suspecting
Ethan stares at his laptop screen.The photo is damning. Crystal clear.Lucian and Ariana. Leaving the Celestial Hotel. Morning of May 13th. Timestamp: 9:47 AM.Exactly twelve hours after Ariana walked in on him with Vanessa.Twelve hours. Not days. Not weeks. Hours.“You seeing this?” Vanessa appe
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 34: Evelyn’s Lunch Invitation
The statement goes live at eight PM Saturday.Joint post. Lucian’s social media. Company website. Press release to major outlets.**Statement from Lucian Blackwood and Ariana Vale:***We are writing to address recent speculation about our relationship. Yes, we are together. Yes, our relationship be
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 33: The Return to Reality
The Meridian presentation goes flawlessly.Two hours of strategy. Market analysis. Financial projections. Lucian and I trading off sections like we’ve been doing this for years instead of weeks.Their board asks hard questions. We answer harder.By the time we finish, three of them are nodding. The
One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend Chapter 32: Julian’s Knowing Questions
My phone rings at midnight.Julian Blackwood.I almost don’t answer. But something tells me I should.“Hello?”“Ariana. Hope I’m not interrupting anything scandalous.” His voice is light. Teasing. But there’s an edge underneath. “How’s Miami?”“How do you know I’m in Miami?”“Lucian told me. Well,
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