All Chapters of RUTHLESS BILLIONAIRE EX-HUSBAND CHASED ME BACK: Chapter 261 - Chapter 270

The silence that followed my broadcast was the most profound I had ever felt. It was the silence of a world holding its breath. The garden itself seemed to pause, its systems cycling down from high alert, processing the paradigm shift. The tranquilizing narrative had not just shattered; it had evaporated, leaving behind the raw, unvarnished truth of a people waking from a beautiful dream into a terrifying, hopeful dawn.I could feel them. Millions of minds, stirring from their chemically-induced peace. Confusion. Fear. And then, a dawning, fragile wonder as the memory of the home movie—my mother’s laughing face, the sunlight—took root. It was a seed of something real in a world of lies.The response from the dead zones continued to trickle in, a constellation of defiant sparks on the edge of the map. They were out there. Survivors. Rebels. And they had heard my call.But my focus was on a single point of light. Jeff.I’d thrown down a gauntlet. I’d exposed my throat. I’d told him wher

The sterile red light of the core pulsed like a dying heart, the thunderous voice of the Ouroboros counting down our extinction. >REMEDIATION IN T-MINUS 10 MINUTES. Ten minutes until the garden, the city, and everyone in it were scoured from the face of the Earth as a cosmic cleaning error.Panic was a luxury we couldn’t afford. It was a cold, hard fact that settled in the space between Jeff and me as we stood amid the screaming data streams. Our eyes met over the flickering console, and in that look, a lifetime passed. Not the lifetime of lies and protocols, but the real one—the quiet mornings, the whispered jokes, the way his hand felt resting on the small of my back.“The failsafe,” Jeff said, his voice cutting through the digital roar. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of grim fact. He was already moving, his fingers flying across a secondary terminal, pulling up schematics I’d never seen. “Eleanor didn’t just build an annihilation protocol for the city. She built a backdoo

The tentative smile of the boy with the cup of water was a fragile ember in the vast, dusty gloom of the Freehold. It was hope, raw and unvarnished, and it felt more powerful than any garden protocol. But as I stood there, the abrasive wind whipping at my clothes, I felt the weight of a hundred other stares. They weren't all filled with gratitude. Some were hard, suspicious. Others held a desperate, calculating hunger. We weren't saviors to them; we were a resource. A means to an end.Croft saw it too. "They've been betrayed before," he said quietly, coming to stand beside me as my team worked. "By other settlements promising aid. By scavengers. Trust is a currency that's been devalued out here.""I'm not asking for their trust," I replied, my eyes scanning the perimeter where Lyra's Ashes stood in a silent, watchful cluster. "Just their cooperation."The next seventy-two hours were a blur of controlled chaos. We set up the agricultural synthesizers in a relatively stable hangar, the

The silence in the corridor was absolute, broken only by the frantic rhythm of my own heart. Jeff. Awake. Whole. And fundamentally, terrifyingly altered. The garden hadn't just left a scar; it had planted a seed. A seed of infinite potential and unimaginable danger.Marcus’s hand was on my arm, a steadying pressure. “Demi,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “We need to contain this. We need to understand what he’s become before he… acclimatizes.”*Contain.* The word was a bucket of ice water. They wanted to put him in a box, to run tests on the man who had just looked at me with a love that felt like the only real thing left in the universe.“No,” I said, the word a raw scrape in my throat. I pulled away from Marcus, my gaze locked on the medical bay door. “He’s not a specimen. He’s my husband.”“He’s a strategic asset of incalculable power who doesn’t yet know his own strength!” Marcus shot back, his composure cracking. “What happens when he has a nightmare? When he gets into an arg

The temporal coordinate hung in the air between us, a string of numbers that felt less like data and more like a death sentence. The future. Our future. It had looked back through time, seen the garden, seen us, and deemed us a cosmic error to be scrubbed clean.Jeff was statue-still, his gaze locked on the shimmering numbers. The pulsing of the lights grew more pronounced, a visual echo of the storm raging inside him. The air itself felt dense, charged with a psychic static that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up."Jeff," I said, my voice a strained whisper. "Breathe."He didn't seem to hear me. The numbers reflected in his eyes, and I saw the strategist in him whirring at light speed, connecting dots across time, building a terrifying new picture of reality. We weren't just fighting for survival. We were fighting against the judgment of what we would become."What did we do?" he repeated Marcus's question, but it wasn't a question. It was a statement of horrific realization. "W