Semua Bab ALMS TO LOVE: Bab 161 - Bab 170

Jamaica's words were clinical, chosen to wound.“but if you make a move to take Candy by force, you will be arrested and the evidence will be used against you.”The threat hung in the air like a blade. For the first time since her carefully cultivated fury had become a social weapon, Marie felt fear. It was a small, hot thing that made nausea burn under her ribs.“You’ll rue this,” she rasped, fight flaring hot and foolishly. “You’ll all rue this.”“Perhaps,” Jamaica said softly, and in that was pity quieter than fury and infinitely colder. “But not for my family. For you.”The line went dead. Marie sagged against the window, the city tilting beneath her.She'd wanted war. She had thought it would look like headlines and stock blips and a crowd eating her words up like bread. Instead it had looked like a child bundled in someone else's arms and a woman's voice saying, plainly and irrevocably, that she was not fit to be trusted with her own daughter.The maid came in again, whispering,

On the estate, Candy received a new silk doll and an extra custard, while Jamaica recited a poem to her in such a voice that made the toy's fur seem dear. Upstairs, at the nursery window, Fiona smoothed Liza's hair and checked a message from Valeria, oblivious to how three men in a moment would step through the service corridor below with an intent so cold, it might have left ice in the veins of the house.Power rearranged itself in the night—quiet, terrible, inevitable.When the city slept, the plan unfolded.The sun had barely climbed above the skyline when Fiona Billion's sedan glided out of the Billion estate gates. Morning lay, deceptively gentle: the sky was brushed with gold; the traffic hummed along EDSA; Liza's laughter was bright in the backseat.“Mommy, can we get ice cream after school?” Liza asked, swinging her legs as her schoolbag bumped her knees.Fiona smiled in the rearview mirror. “Only if you finish your home

A small kid—half tremble, half bravado, eyes too old for his face—pointed with a shaking finger toward a dark corner stacked with pallets. “They’re there,” he croaked.They moved like a single organism: two men angled left, a woman operative swept low to the floor and a pair of boots landed as someone kicked away an oil-stained tarp. Light slashed across the concrete and for a second the world held its breath.Fiona’s heart exploded into a thousand hot pieces when her outline blurred into the wash of flashlights. Someone’s voice—Ramon’s—barked orders; the men in black snapped into positions around the room. Then, impossibly, Marie Drams stepped forward from the knot of shadows, closer than Fiona expected, a look on her face like a living wound.“Do you think they’ll find you?!” Marie screamed, each word a serrated thing. “Before they do, I’ll make sure you die!” She slapped

They moved like predators and accountants at once: Ramon's men in black, Valeria's legal team in soft shoes, and a phalanx of analysts who read the world in packets and timestamps. The Billion house had become a command center, its maps and live feeds plastered to walls, halos of monitor light painting everyone's faces the color of surveillance."Show me the trail," Madam Jamaica said, her voice an icicle. She did not sit. She could not. The house she'd built thrummed with alertness around her.Ramon pulled up the chain on a screen: a fat river of transactions, time stamps, and IP hops. "They moved money through three jurisdictions," he said. "Cayman, Malta, Cyprus. Then into a Cypriot holding shell that funnels through a boutique firm in Prague. The data route bounces through a farm outside Prague before it hits a cache in London. That's our lever."Valeria leaned forward, steepling her fingers. "So Brenn thinks he's inscrutable. He's not. We trace the proxies, we freeze the accounts

The storm outside Makati had not yet broken, but the air already smelled of thunder.On the television screens across the estate, the headlines ran like prophecy:“BRENN TAYLOR CAPTURED IN LONDON—INTERNATIONAL WARRANT EXECUTED.”“MARIE DRAMS UNDER CUSTODY—NO BAIL RECOMMENDED.”Inside the Billion estate’s war room, silence reigned. The air hummed with static and vindication. Every light from the monitors glowed across faces that had waited too long for justice.Ramon leaned against the table, his voice low, clipped. “It’s done. Brenn’s been extradited from Heathrow. London Police and Interpol executed at 3:47 a.m. local. He didn’t resist—he knows it’s over.”Jamaica Billion did not smile. Her cane clicked against marble once, like the echo of a gavel. “And the woman who unleashed him?”Valeria adjusted her glasses, reading from her phone. &ldq