All Chapters of He Chose my Cousin, so I Chose Revenge: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

The rain had already started before I woke, soft and insistent against the glass like fingers tapping for entry. I stayed under the sheets longer than usual, not because I was tired but because the weight of everything we hadn’t said the night before still lingered in the air. Julian was not beside me. His side of the bed was still faintly warm, but the rest of the room had grown cold in his absence.I got up slowly, pulling on one of his long-sleeved shirts that hung low over my thighs. The hem was wrinkled, the cuffs stretched from the way he always pushed them up past his elbows. The scent of him clung to the fabric, warm and clean and unmistakably his. I ran my hand down the length of the sleeve and let it rest there, curled loosely in my lap, as I sat at the edge of the bed staring at the floorboards.There were things we both knew but had not yet spoken aloud. His silence about the anonymous message was beginning to settle between us like a fog, and though I couldn’t name the sp

I woke to the soft weight of Julian’s hand draped loosely over my waist. The room was still dim, with only the early morning light sneaking in through the linen curtains, but I didn’t move. My breath stayed even, quiet, as I let myself feel the hush that existed between us before the world stirred. His palm was warm. Familiar. Grounding in a way I hadn’t known I would ever come to need.We hadn’t spoken about it the first night I stayed. There had been no discussion. No drawn lines. No defined shift. Only the gravity of the day that had come before, the unraveling that happened quietly once the door had shut behind us. And since then, it had become natural. Undramatic. He never crossed into my space unless I invited him. He never assumed. But I had stopped pulling away.There was a peace to the mornings that didn’t exist anywhere else. No calls. No urgent alerts from Claudia. No half-breathed panic from Simone. Just the warmth of a body I trusted beside me, and the

The email came at 9:14 in the morning. I had barely touched the tea Elise had left by my office window when I saw it appear, plain and unassuming, tucked between routine shipping updates and boutique appointment requests. The subject line was spare, impersonal. “Concerning a breach of trust.” I almost ignored it.But something in the phrasing made me pause. Not urgent, not dramatic, not embellished. Just quiet certainty.I opened it.There was no greeting. No name. Only a few lines, typed plainly.Someone on Alessia’s board has been forwarding sensitive documents to third-party stakeholders to undercut your expansion model. They’ve done this twice in the last three months. I can prove it. I am not your enemy.I stared at the screen, my pulse beginning to rise, not in panic but with the calm, sharpened heat of calculation. A name followed at the bottom, a junior partner I remembered vaguely from old boardroom minutes. Not one of Alessia’s inner circle, but someone close enough to have

It started on a Monday morning, the kind of grey sky morning that makes the world feel like it’s holding its breath. I had barely taken two sips of coffee when Claudia called me, her voice already clipped at the edges.“There are people from the Internal Board at the Trieste store. Suits. Not buyers.”I stood by the window, staring at the mist crawling over the rooftops like it knew what was coming. I didn’t speak. I didn’t have to.“They’re calling it a ‘routine multi-site audit.’ But it’s not routine, Juliana. We’ve never had this kind of thing. Not without a heads-up. Not this aggressive.”By noon, they had reached the Milan location. Then Naples. Paris followed before the sun set. Our internal records were pulled, our staff questioned. Receipts. Payroll ledgers. Shipment reports. Even the patterns from last season’s archive were suddenly under review, like someone was hoping to catch us in a loop of copyright or a clerical inconsistency buried deep in the folds.It wasn’t just dis

I had always believed there was a limit to how much truth a person could carry in silence, but standing in the marble foyer of Howard Blackwell’s estate, I felt the weight of a history that had been written behind closed doors, beneath polished floors, and inside ledgers no one was meant to read. The place smelled like money that had aged too long—cold, pristine, with nothing human left in its corners. The butler who opened the door barely looked at me. He had been told I was coming.Howard stood waiting in the drawing room. His back was turned to the fireplace, arms folded, one ankle casually hooked over the other like this was a social call. He wore a suit that looked expensive but careless. His salt-and-pepper hair had been combed back, but I could still see the edges where the dye no longer touched. I had never met him like this before, not as the man behind Julian’s silence, not as the figure who had shaped so many of the betrayals still rippling through my life. Only in photogra