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Chapter 11: The Scars
publish date:
2026-04-14 15:33:47
Latest chapter
The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride Chapter 25: The Public Crack
POV: Lena Moretti Ezra owned enough Crane Industries stock to attend board meetings. A position he'd built quietly over years, buying shares through Blackthorn subsidiaries in amounts small enough to avoid triggering disclosure requirements. Individually, each holding was insignificant. Combined, they gave him a seat at the table. He'd never used it. Until now. The board meeting was at Crane Tower. Victor's building. Forty floors of glass and steel with the family name etched into the lobby marble. Walking in felt like entering enemy territory with a target on my back. Which it was. Naomi stayed in the car. Dominic stayed at the office. This was just Ezra and me, walking through the lobby and riding the elevator to the executive floor where the men who ran the Crane empire gathered once a quarter to discuss how to stay rich and powerful. I'd been in this building once before, years ago, when my father brought me to meet Victor and discuss "the arrangement." I was nineteen. I wore a
The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride Chapter 24: The Morning After
POV: Lena Moretti I woke up in my bed. Alone. At some point during the night he'd carried me here, or I'd walked, or we'd stumbled together through the dark penthouse. I couldn't remember. What I remembered was the floor. The wall. His mouth. His whispered confession against the back of my neck. I was never going to use you. I just didn't know how to keep you. I lay there for ten minutes staring at the ceiling and running an inventory of my body. Sore in places that made me flush. A faint bruise on my hip where his fingers had gripped too hard. The ghost sensation of his hand tracing my spine. I pressed my face into the pillow and it smelled like him and that was somehow worse than all the rest of it combined because it meant he'd been here. In my bed. Close enough to leave his scent on my pillow. And then he'd left before I woke up. I got dressed and walked to the kitchen and he was already there. Dressed for work. Suit jacket on. Hair combed. Coffee made. He looked exactly like t
The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride Chapter 23: The Dam Breaks
POV: Lena Moretti It started over something small. A file I'd moved from his desk to mine without telling him. He came into the living room where I was working and asked where the Hadley and Cross incorporation records had gone. I told him I'd taken them to cross-reference against the shell company timeline. He said I should have asked. I said I didn't realize I needed permission to do the job he'd brought me in to do. It should have ended there. A minor disagreement about workflow. Two people who'd been working in close quarters for weeks and needed to recalibrate their boundaries. Should have been a thirty-second conversation. But nothing between us was thirty seconds anymore. Everything had weight. Everything had layers. And we'd been holding too much back for too long. "You don't get to control the flow of information and then get angry when I access something without checking with you first," I said. "You promised me transparency. You promised no more managing what I can hand
The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride Chapter 22: The Unmasking
POV: Lena Moretti The trap sprung on a Friday. Naomi's external surveillance picked up the signal at 9:14 AM. Julian made a phone call to his personal broker requesting information about a pharmaceutical acquisition target in Southeast Asia. The same fake target I'd designed as bait number four. Specific details. Correct numbers. The exact fabricated scenario I'd built for suspect number four on our list. Suspect four was a man named Reeves. Mid-level security operative. Three years with Blackthorn. Clean record. Good performance reviews. The kind of employee who blended into the background because he never did anything notable enough to stand out. Which, I was learning, was exactly the profile you'd expect from someone hiding something. Ezra didn't react when Naomi delivered the confirmation. He read the report, set it down, and said, "Bring him to the conference room on sixteen." The same flat voice he'd used during the interrogations. The same controlled stillness. I'd watched h
The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride Chapter 21: The Hunt
POV: Lena Moretti The idea came to me at breakfast. Ezra was eating toast and reading access logs and pretending that eight hours ago he hadn't been kissing my neck on his desk. I was drinking coffee and pretending the same thing. We were getting good at pretending. Practice makes perfect. "Canary trap," I said. He looked up. Waited. "You have six suspects. You feed each one a different piece of false intelligence. Something specific enough that Julian would act on it. Something unique to each suspect so that when the information surfaces on Julian's side, you know exactly who leaked it." I set my coffee down. "I can design the financial details. Each one needs to look real enough to be valuable but different enough to trace." He stared at me for a moment. Not the cold operational stare from last night. Something warmer. Surprised, maybe, that I'd gotten there before he did. Or maybe not surprised at all. Maybe just noticing, again, that I was more than the piece he'd put on the
The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride Chapter 20: The Traitor
POV: Lena Moretti They found the device at 1:47 AM. A transmitter the size of a matchbox, hardwired into the ventilation system on the forty-seventh floor, three floors below the penthouse. It was broadcasting on an encrypted frequency that Naomi's team traced to a relay point six blocks away. From there, the signal bounced to a server registered to a company called Ashford Communications. Camille Ashford's family business. Julian's supply chain. The technology was Julian's. That much was clear within the first hour. But the placement was the problem. The forty-seventh floor wasn't public access. It required a security badge, a biometric scan, and clearance from Naomi's team. Nobody walked onto that floor without being logged. Nobody could have planted hardware in the ventilation system without physical access, tools, and at least twenty uninterrupted minutes. Which meant someone on the inside had done it. Someone with a badge. Someone with clearance. Someone Ezra trusted. I watch
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