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Chapter 24: Isabella's Line
publish date:
2026-07-23 00:53:06
Latest chapter
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 25: The Loyal Ones
Isabella's POVI found the pattern at two in the morning, surrounded by three years of internal reports spread across my dining table, coffee gone cold beside me.It started small. A line item in a projections report from March, nearly identical in phrasing to a quote Margaret had given an industry newsletter two weeks later. I almost dismissed it as coincidence, until I found a second one. Then a third. Internal numbers, specific enough that no outsider should have had access to them, showing up almost verbatim in conversations Margaret had been having with select investors over the past four months.I pulled the distribution list for each of those reports and cross-referenced it against board attendance records, against calendar requests, against anything I could find. Three names kept appearing in places they shouldn't have. Harold Whitfield. Simon Reyes. Thomas Bell. Men my father had brought onto the board fifteen years ago, men who'd known me since I was a girl visiting his offi
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 24: Isabella's Line
Isabella's POVRichard Voss didn't even try to lie once the folder was open in front of him.We met in a small conference room, just the two of us, legal counsel, and Julien standing quietly by the window. Voss looked older than I remembered from board meetings, smaller somehow, like the weight of what he'd done had finally caught up to his posture."The consulting fees," I said, sliding the documents across the table. "Traced to a shell firm registered under Margaret Hamilton's estate lawyer. Timed exactly with every discrepancy in the Caldwell reports."Voss stared at the papers for a long moment before he spoke. "I didn't think it would go this far.""You leaked false information to the financial press," I said. "You cost this company four percent of its market value in a single morning. I'd say it already went that far.""She said it was just business," he said quietly. "Adjusting numbers slightly to slow the merger. She never mentioned the press. That was supposed to stay interna
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 23: Choosing Sides
Julien's POVIt took me four more days to find the last piece I needed.The trail led to a board member named Richard Voss, a quiet man in his sixties who rarely spoke up in meetings, the kind of person everyone forgets to watch closely because he never gives them a reason to. I found the connection almost by accident, cross-referencing a shell consulting firm listed as "corporate advisory" on the adjusted Caldwell reports against Voss's public financial disclosures.The consulting firm didn't exist. Not really. It was a shell registered under my mother's estate lawyer, funneling payments to Voss for "advisory services" that matched, almost to the dollar, the timing of every discrepancy I'd traced through the reports.I sat with that information for an entire evening before I let myself accept what it meant. My mother hadn't just planted doubt through gossip and boardroom threats. She'd paid a Hartford board member directly to falsify numbers and leak them to the press. That wasn't in
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 22: The Smear Campaign
Isabella's POVThe headline was already trending by the time I got to my office.*"Hartford Enterprises: Cracks in the Merger? Sources Suggest Financial Mismanagement Under New Leadership."*I read it twice, standing in the doorway with my coat still on, before I even set my bag down. My phone was already buzzing, message after message piling up. Naomi. My father. Two board members. A reporter I didn't recognize, asking for comment before nine in the morning."Have you seen it?" Naomi asked, appearing in my doorway before I'd even taken my coat off."I'm looking at it now." I sat down slowly, scanning the article. It cited "internal sources" claiming Hartford's post-merger earnings projections had been quietly revised downward, that the integration of Hamilton's operations was costing far more than announced, that shareholders should be concerned about who was really steering the company. No names. No solid evidence. Just enough doubt to make people nervous."It's not true," Naomi sai
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 21: Cracks in the Boardroom
Julien's POVI noticed it on a Tuesday, buried in a stack of reports I wasn't even supposed to see.Naomi had accidentally left a folder on the printer near my desk, the kind of mistake that happens when someone's carrying too much at once. I picked it up to bring it to her, and that's when the numbers caught my eye. Quarterly projections for the Caldwell account, the same account I'd spent weeks reconciling by hand.The totals didn't match.Not by much. A few hundred thousand here, a discrepancy in the shipping margins there. Small enough that most people skimming the report would never notice. But I'd spent three months buried in these exact numbers, invoice by invoice, and I knew them the way I used to know boardroom faces. These weren't my numbers."Naomi," I said, catching her in the hallway before she reached the elevator. "This report on the Caldwell account. Where did it come from?"She glanced at the folder, frowning slightly. "That should have come from finance. Why?""The n
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 20: The Long Game
Isabella's POVPeople kept asking me why I did it. Why I demanded the shares, the merger, his obedience under my name instead of just walking away with the money and never looking at him again. My lawyer asked. My father asked, gently, over dinner one night. Even Claire asked, though she already suspected the real answer before I said it out loud.I always gave the same reply. "Because he owes it to the company." Because Hartford Enterprises deserved fair compensation for six years of being treated like an afterthought. Because it was good business.None of that was a lie, exactly. But it wasn't the whole truth either.I sat in my office late one evening, long after everyone else had gone home, staring at the quarterly reports without really reading them. The truth, the part I hadn't said out loud to anyone, not even Claire, was simpler and harder to admit.I didn't do this for revenge. I did it because for six years, I had no control over anything. Not over Julien's attention. Not ov
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 10: The Reckoning
Isabella's POV The Rolls hadn’t even come to a full stop before Genny was out of the car, heels clicking like gunfire on the gravel. I followed, legs numb, heart hammering so hard I could taste it. She didn’t head for the drawing room. She marched straight to the library, flung the double door
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 9: The Day Out
Isabella's POV Aunt Genevieve arrived like a hurricane in haute couture. The dove-gray Rolls purred up the drive at exactly ten. She stepped out in sunglasses big enough to have their own postcode, a cream silk jumpsuit, and heels that could double as weapons. One look at my borrowed hoodie and
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 7: Home at Last
Isabella's POV The car turned off the main road and the gates appeared, tall, black iron, the Hartford crest still gleaming in the dusk. I forgot how to breathe. Jayden slowed the Bentley, rolled the window down, and the scent hit me first: lilacs. Hundreds of them, thousands, spilling over the
Rejected, Now He Craves For Me Chapter 6: A trip down Memory lane
For some moments the room felt still. Isabella’s words hung in the air, trembling between disbelief and revelation. “I—I remember.” Jayden didn’t speak right away. He just watched her, watched the way her shoulders shook, the way her fingers pressed into the couch as though she needed something s
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