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Chapter 040: The Vivienne File
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2026-08-22 20:30:04
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The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife Chapter 040: The Vivienne File
Noel's POV Her name was Rosa Delgado, and she'd worked in the Stone household for eleven years before she finally gave her notice and left on her own terms, nobody pushing her out, four years after the night that still, by her own admission, hadn't fully let her sleep. It took me three weeks to find her. Not because she was hiding — she wasn't, she was simply old, and small, and living in a modest apartment two hours outside the city that nobody with real money had any reason to ever drive to. Cassandra's household contacts got me the name. The rest was patience, the one skill I'd genuinely developed these past difficult months, whether I'd wanted to or not. I brought cash the first visit. She didn't take it. I brought groceries the second visit, along with a patience I didn't know I still had in me, and sat with her two hours talking about nothing — her grandchildren, her knees, a garden she could no longer kneel down to tend — before I ever once said Vivienne's name out lo
The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife Chapter 039: A Fragile Peace
Natasha's POV The smoke alarm went off at seven-forty on a Tuesday, which was how I knew, with total certainty, that Ace Stone had never once in his life attempted to make French toast. "It's fine," he said, waving a dish towel at the ceiling like he was negotiating with it. "It's supposed to do that." "It is not supposed to do that." "Char adds flavor." "Char is not a flavor, Ace, char is a warning." I grabbed the broom from behind the pantry door and jabbed the alarm's button with the handle end, laughing too hard to actually hit it on the first three tries, and he stood there holding a spatula like a man defending a position he already knew was lost, egg-soaked bread smoking gently in the pan behind him. The alarm finally quit. The silence that followed had a ringing quality to it, ears still adjusting, and I looked over at him — genuinely one of the most powerful men in the country, standing in his own kitchen in a T-shirt with a flour handprint on one hip, looking p
The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife Chapter 038: Noel Is Served
Noel's POV The casting director was mid-sentence about a spring campaign — something about "clean, editorial energy" and "not overworking the smile" — when the door at the back of the studio opened without a knock. I noticed him before anyone else did, because noticing things before anyone else did was the entire skill set that had kept me employable for a decade in a business built on being looked at. Gray suit, cheap in a way that didn't try to hide it, a manila envelope held flat against his side like he'd done this exact walk a hundred times and had stopped finding it interesting somewhere around walk forty. "Noel MaCarro?" Twelve heads turned. I felt every single one of them land on me at once, the specific weight of a room's attention shifting all at once from professional to personal, and some old, reliable instinct told me to smile before I'd even decided to. "That's me," I said, light, easy, already half-convinced I could turn this into nothing at all. "You've b
The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife Chapter 037: Marcus Delivers the Tape
Marcus's POV "You're going to want to sit down for this." Ace didn't sit down. He never did when I said it like that — if anything, saying it made him stand straighter, the particular readiness of a man who preferred to take bad news on his feet. He set his coffee down on the counter without looking at it and folded his arms. "Just tell me, Marcus." "I have someone in place watching Noel MaCarro. Have for a while now." I said it plainly, because there wasn't a version of this conversation where softening the setup helped either of us. "Since the blocked text traced back four blocks from her apartment, I didn't like leaving that as a coincidence. I put a contact on her — nothing invasive, just eyes, in public, wherever she went. Three days ago, that contact was in a coffee shop when Noel sat down with a man named Devon Ackerly. Former Bloom and Co. intern." Ace's jaw shifted, filing the name. "Go on." "He left the company eight months ago. Deep in debt. My contact recorded t
The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife Chapter 036: The Leak
Ace's POV"How many outlets.""Four, that I've confirmed. Maybe six by the time we're done counting." Marcus didn't look up from his laptop, which told me more than his voice did. Marcus always looked up. It was a habit, a courtesy, something he did automatically even in the middle of a crisis — and the fact that he didn't now meant he was reading something he didn't want to say out loud twice."Show me."He turned the screen around.The headline sat there in the particular ugly font gossip sites used for stories they knew would get clicked whether or not they were true: ACE STONE'S WIFE ACCUSED OF STEALING FROM CLIENTS — LEAKED DOCUMENTS. Below it, a photo of Natasha from a charity gala three months ago, not long after the wedding, smiling, unaware, captioned like evidence.I read it once. Then I read it again, slower, the way you make yourself walk back into a burning room to check the thing you already know is true."It's fabricated," I said."I know that. You know that." Marcus fi
The Billionaire's Scandalous Fat Wife Chapter 035: Cracks in the Alliance
Noel's POV "Twenty thousand isn't going to feel real to you in six months, Devon. Debt like yours never does. It just becomes the weather." He flinched at that, which was exactly the reaction I wanted — not offense, just the specific, tired flinch of someone hearing an uncomfortable truth said plainly by a stranger who clearly understood his situation better than his own family did. The coffee shop hummed around us, crowded and anonymous in the particular way I'd chosen it for, forty conversations happening at once, the espresso machine hissing every few seconds, everyone around us absorbed in their own laptops and conversations, exactly the kind of crowd I'd chosen the place for. "I don't even know what you actually want me to do," Devon said, low, glancing at the manila folder I'd slid halfway across the table like it might leave fingerprints. "I left Bloom and Co. eight months ago. I don't have current access to anything. They'd have wiped my credentials the day I resigned.
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