All Chapters of My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

The morning after our nonprofit’s official launch party — a modest, unpolished affair filled with fold-out chairs, lukewarm coffee, and people who’d been bruised but not broken — I woke to the sound of Callum whispering into the phone on our apartment balcony.His voice was low but urgent, the kind of tone that pulls you out of sleep and into instinct.I slipped out of bed and padded toward him. He didn’t hear me until I was nearly at the door.“No, I understand,” he was saying. “But if she’s willing to come forward, I’ll fly out myself. No press. No exposure. Just us.”A pause. Then: “Yes. I’ll protect her. I promise.”When he turned and saw me, he didn’t flinch or scramble to hang up. He just nodded at whoever was on the other end and said, “I’ll be in touch.” Then ended the call."Another whistleblower?" I asked, arms folded across my chest, shielding myself from the early spring chill.Callum nodded, rubbing his jaw. “She worked in one of the offshore facilities. Environmental vio

We didn’t sleep that night.The files were out. Everything — from Project Hermitage to the Novus Shield rebranding, the price tags on journalists, and the voice of Danielle Price talking about human lives like chess pawns — was now in the bloodstream of the internet.By morning, it was chaos.#NovusFiles was trending in eight countries. Newsrooms that had once tread cautiously now broke ranks, emboldened by the proof. Elena’s testimony ran alongside screenshots of her employment records and blurry photographs of offshore facilities with smoke pouring from illegal burn pits. Political figures were cornered on live television with questions they couldn’t dodge.We watched it all from a windowless basement beneath a decommissioned library on the edge of the city — one of Will’s “safe nests.” No windows. Concrete walls. Generator power and a coffee machine that sputtered like it had PTSD.Will was at the monitor, bouncing between news feeds and encrypted chats. “Interpol flagged the CEO o

We disappeared again.After the collapse of the Gulf site, we scattered — not out of fear, but necessity. The storm was here, and its winds were erratic. Some of us went deep underground. Others surfaced in plain sight, shielded by the sheer power of exposure. But none of us stayed still.Will went dark first. He dumped the remaining drives with five trusted allies — digital custodians who mirrored the data across anonymized networks. Then he vanished. No signal, no trace.Callum and I relocated to Berlin. It was noisy enough to be invisible, paranoid enough to be safe. Elena joined us three weeks later, still weak, but burning with focus. She had changed in the black room. There was a sharpness to her now — like metal hardened by fire.The world outside roared louder each day.The “Recursive Ethics Protocols” leaked across more than 120 news outlets. Some tried to discredit them, spinning tales of synthetic forgeries or “AI-generated disinformation.” But forensic analysts — the good

Berlin had gone quiet.After the virus launched, there was a lull — not peace, exactly, but the kind of stillness that follows a tectonic shift. Protestors were still in the streets, headlines still spun, and Novus Shield’s remnants were scrambling to erase their fingerprints. But for us, it was waiting time.Will was off-grid chasing down a suspected mole. Elena was silent again — not unusual, but it gnawed at me all the same. And Callum…Callum was perfect.Too perfect.He brewed my coffee exactly the way I liked it. He woke up before me, padded around barefoot, bare-chested, humming some song I didn’t recognize. He kissed me like we had all the time in the world. And when I had nightmares — and I still did — he held me until they stopped mattering.That’s what made it worse.The message came in through an old comms relay we hadn’t used since Prague — a secure terminal we’d buried beneath three encryption layers and a rotating cipher. It shouldn’t have been active.I found it by acc

There’s a kind of silence that doesn’t feel empty.The kind that wraps around you after a moment so sharp, so unforgiving, that your brain hasn’t caught up yet. Like the second after a gunshot, or the pause before someone says, “It’s not what you think.”I sat in that silence, staring at the message on Callum’s encrypted tablet.It had lit up when he stepped away to take a call — some logistics check-in with Will. He’d left it open. That alone should’ve been a red flag. Callum never left anything unsecured.But maybe… maybe part of him wanted me to see it.The message was from Lara.Lara: The flight from Riyadh is booked. If we do this, there’s no turning back.Below that, a location ping.Not Novus-related. Not a safehouse.A villa. Remote. Coastal. Private.There was a follow-up message, timestamped an hour earlier.Lara: Are you sure about her? You said she’d never find out.And then — the worst part — the reply.Callum: She’s distracted with the child protocols. Let’s finish this