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Chapter 165: The Debate

Penulis: Evve
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-02-03 04:14:22

The honeymoon was over.

Not the marriage. The marriage was thriving, a warm, solid thing built on Sunday pancakes and shared glances. But the business honeymoon—the polite, tentative "we are partners" phase—had lasted exactly three weeks.

It was 10 AM on a Tuesday. The conference room at the AVA flagship had been converted into the headquarters for "The Alliance," the joint collection with Cross Empire and LVMH.

The table was covered in sketches, swatches, and tension.

"It's too soft," Liam sai
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    The secret sat in the center of the room, invisible but heavy, displacing the air like a localized high-pressure system.Liam sat on the living room rug. It was Saturday morning. The penthouse was filled with the lazy, golden dust of a weekend that had no schedule.Ethan was lying on his stomach, reading a graphic novel about black holes. River was sitting cross-legged, sorting his matchbox cars by color (a spectrum that moved precisely from red to violet). Hope was trying to put a pair of sunglasses on Buster, the golden retriever, who tolerated the indignity with a heavy sigh.It was perfect. It was a closed loop of safety.And they were about to introduce a variable that could blow it wide open.Liam looked at Aurora. She was sitting on the sofa, her hands wrapped around a mug of decaf tea. She looked calm—the Zoloft and the therapy were holding the walls up—but Liam saw the tremor in her fingers.She nodded. Time."Hey, guys," Liam said. His voice rumbled in his chest. "Board meet

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    The morning after the livestream, the world looked different from the eighty-first floor of the Cross Empire tower. Liam Cross stood by the window, his back to the room, a cup of coffee cooling in his hand. The rain had stopped. The sky over Manhattan was a brilliant, piercing blue, the kind of cl

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    The gala had been a disaster for Aurora, but for Vanessa Leigh, it was a resurrection.She stood in the humid, earth-scented shadows of the conservatory, concealed behind a dense wall of weeping figs. The air here was heavy, cloying with the smell of damp soil and expensive orchids, a stark contras

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