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CHAPTER 12: DARK PROVISION
publish date:
2026-04-25 09:13:40
Latest chapter
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 14: THE THURSDAY
Sebastian had been on the phone saying my name the night before he married someone else. I drove home from that lunch and sat in my car for twenty minutes before I trusted myself to go upstairs.I didn't cry, not because I was holding it together, but because what moved through me in that car park… hands in my lap, engine off, the afternoon going on outside the windscreen without me wasn't the kind of thing that became tears. It was slower than that, heavier. The particular sensation of a story you have lived inside for sixteen years beginning to change shape underneath you, and there being absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.He had been saying my name at 3am. I had built everything on what I knew. The engagement announcement on a Thursday morning and the silence that followed. One phone call, his voice careful and low, my name in his mouth, and then the click of the line going dead because I had hung up before he could say anything else. I had made that story clean and final
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 13: THE OTHER SIDE
Sebastian's wife wanted to talk, and the terrifying part was that she sounded like someone who was on my side.I said yes, not immediately. I sat with the phone against my ear long enough that she could hear me deciding… not hesitating, actually deciding, and then I said yes because I had spent sixteen years working with an incomplete version of events and the incompleteness had started to cost me more than the truth ever could.We met at a restaurant she suggested. Quiet, midweek, the kind of place designed for conversations that needed to stay where they were put. I arrived first deliberately, ordered water I wouldn't drink, and was already seated and composed when she walked in.I had seen her in photographs, society pages. The wedding announcement I had found on a Thursday morning that had quietly ended my world. I thought I understood what I was walking into.I was not entirely right. Claire Sutton-Hale moved through the restaurant with the practiced ease of a woman who had been
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 12: DARK PROVISION
Marcus left me alone with it. He closed his laptop, said “take the document, call me when you're ready,” and walked out without asking a single question I wasn't prepared to answer. That was the thing about Marcus, he always knew the difference between a moment that needed talking through and one that needed to be survived quietly. He got it right every time.I spread the documents across my desk and read them slowly, then again. Then a third time, because the second time hadn't made it any easier to hold.Legitimate, fully funded, untouched from the day it was opened. Three pages of clean, expensive legal work sitting quietly in the financial system for sixteen years like something that had been patiently waiting.Certain it would eventually be found.Set up two months after Sebastian's wedding. Two months after I had walked away from that church and taken a bus to my mother's house and sat at her kitchen table saying “I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm completely fine,” while something inside
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 11: THE ENVELOPE
Victor Hale had just tried to buy me out of the room the same way he bought his son a bride. The man had exactly one move, and he had just shown it to me.I want to go back twenty minutes.I had been heading for the lobby exit, folder under my arm, mind already on the drive back, when Victor appeared near the window seating. Silver-haired, unhurried. Phone in hand like he'd simply wandered over, like this was accidental.Victor Hale was never accidental. I sat down anyway because refusing to sit would have handed him something, and I wasn't giving this man anything he hadn't taken already.He opened with pleasantries. Compliments about my firm…measured, impersonal, the kind you gave someone you were about to insult. Then something about Sebastian having good taste dropped into the conversation with just enough weight to test whether it would land somewhere soft.It didn't. I kept my face pleasant and my spine straight and waited for the real thing. He reached into his jacket and slo
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 10: CRACKS IN THE WALL
Sixteen years old and sharp in a way that missed nothing, Isla had stood at that window and watched Sebastian outside our building. The moment that truth settled in, something inside me tightened. The clock on my secret, the one I had kept locked away for sixteen years had started ticking, loud and impossible to ignore.I looked at her standing there in the hallway, still in her pajamas, eyes fixed on me in that quiet, searching way that had always made lying to her feel worse than it should. I made a decision at that moment, not the brave one, not the right one, just the only one I had the strength for at nine-thirty at night, after everything had already drained me dry.“It was a work thing,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Someone from the Hale account. It couldn’t wait.”Isla didn’t respond immediately. She just looked at me, those grey eyes holding mine with a calm kind of focus that had never let a half-truth pass easily in sixteen years.“At this hour?” she asked, her tone
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 9: FIVE MINUTES TOO LATE
Sebastian stood outside my building like something pulled straight out of a life I had already buried. The moment I saw him, my stomach dropped, a sharp, instinctive reaction I couldn’t control no matter how much time had passed. I gave myself exactly three seconds, just enough to take in the details I didn’t want to notice, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, the faint grey threading through his hair, the way his shoulders seemed weighed down by something I couldn’t see but could somehow feel. Then I shut it all down, forcing everything back into place before it could surface, and walked straight toward him.I stopped about four feet away, close enough to catch the familiar trace of his cologne, a scent I hadn’t realized I still remembered, and far enough to hold onto what little control I had left. His jaw was tight, a muscle flickering under the skin, and when his eyes met mine, there was nothing guarded there. No distance, no practiced composure, just exhaustion and regret
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