Lahat ng Kabanata ng The CEO’s Temptation : Kabanata 201 - Kabanata 210

*****************************POV: Mack************************* --- 2:10 a.m. The numbers blinked on the screen in front of me like a dare. The signal came early. Ten minutes earlier than usual. Ten minutes off a rhythm that Claire had built with surgical precision. Claire didn’t do random. If she changed something, it meant something. And that terrified me more than silence. “Run it again,” I said hoarsely. Reeve didn’t question me—just pulled up the packet and decrypted it one more time. The pulse was unmistakable. Subtle. Disguised in the same way as before. A phantom breath hidden inside white noise, layered through dummy frequencies and masked like static—but there. Loud in the quiet if you knew how to listen. Claire’s voice was in the code. Not literally. But I heard her. I felt her. She was reaching. And this time, she was screaming without a sound. Ten minutes early wasn’t just an accident. It was a signal about the signal. A shift in the pattern that meant one th

*******************************POV: Liam************************** --- The villa felt different tonight. Quieter—but not the kind of quiet that soothed. This was the kind that buzzed behind your eyes. The kind that warned. Something was off. I stood in the hallway, barefoot, one hand resting against the wall as I listened. The sea pressed against the cliffs below with its usual rhythm, but the sound didn’t calm me like it used to. Not anymore. Not since Claire had started smiling too easily. Speaking softer. Pretending too well. Pretending. The thought lodged in my chest like a shard of glass. I walked toward her room. The hallways were always dim at night, lit only by low sconces along the stone walls. I kept it that way—intimate. Romantic. Like a sanctuary where nothing else existed. No past. No threats. No lies. Only us. That’s how it was supposed to be. And yet… something was wrong. --- I stopped outside her door, not knocking. Just… listening. No footsteps. No brea

POV: Mack --- The war room buzzed. Not with panic this time, but with movement. Real movement. No more waiting. No more sitting around like ghosts chasing signals in the dark. I stood over the operations table, sleeves rolled up, palms flat against the smooth metal, staring down at the newly flagged red dot flashing off the Montenegrin coast. Claire’s signal had come through again—only this time, earlier. And different. A deviation like that wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate. She was telling us something. “Coordinate locked?” I asked without turning. “Confirmed,” Reeve said. “It’s a shift of thirty-seven minutes, just like you suspected. Same transmitter. Same frequency. But she’s altering the drop time now.” “Which means she knows we’re watching,” I said, straightening. “And more importantly,” Liz added from the side, arms folded across her chest, “she’s buying us time.” For the first time in days, she didn’t look like she was carrying the weight of the world. Her eyes

*****************************POV: Mack*************************** The air was thick with salt and tension. From our position along the cliffside, the villa was a cold silhouette against the black sea—its modern glass and concrete edges glowing faintly in the moonlight. It looked empty from here. Still. Quiet. But I knew better. Liam was in there. So was Claire. And this time, we weren’t guessing. I crouched low behind a ridge of jagged rock as Reeve’s voice crackled in my ear. “Signal confirmed. All comms are dark. You’ve got twenty minutes max before they switch to a backup grid.” “Copy that,” I said. “Team, move.” We split. Julian and I swept left toward the western balcony. Nora and Rowe covered the opposite flank. Our boots hit the gravel without a sound. Our breaths were tight and measured, like the sea crashing below—violent, restrained. Claire had changed the signal again. The shift in timing, the faint deviation in the frequency—it wasn’t random. It was brilliant. She’d

********************************POV: Liz*************************** The screen flickered. Once. Twice. Then, the signal stopped. I didn’t breathe. For three days, Claire’s pulse had danced across the screen like a whisper—light, coded, steady. That small, silent heartbeat was the only thing tethering me to sanity. The only proof she was still fighting was And now it was gone. My hands were shaking before I realized I’d stood. The war room blurred—whiteboards covered in scrawled maps, mission logs, images of the villa, the signals, Claire’s face—God, her face. Then, from the far corner, Henry’s voice broke through the static buzzing in my head. “We just lost her.” No one responded. Because we all felt it. Something had happened. “Pull up the satellite feed again,” I said hoarsely, moving closer. “Zoom in on the villa—west side. That’s where she was.” My voice barely worked, but somehow, Henry understood. His fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling the latest drone visual