Lahat ng Kabanata ng Her Father’s Billionaire Best Friend : Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

We moved before dawn like animals that had learned the sound of danger: quiet, efficient, and absolutely certain. Marcus had his suit on but no tie, a private code for business that must be done before the world woke up and made moral judgments. Adrian’s team rolled in with cases that looked like they belonged to concert roadies — racks, boxes, portable analyzers. Juliette had three devices tethered to her wrist like talismans. Detective Moreno’s presence was a low, comforting engine; when he nodded, it felt like the law itself leaned forward.“There’s no glamour to this,” Adrian said as we loaded into the unmarked vans. “We go through their network, find the cache that’s been storing feeds, and then we trace. We do everything under a warrant. We document. We don’t become them.”I kept my face as neutral as I could. Neutral is a muscle you build when the world wants to turn every feeling into a headline. Neutral felt absurd because I wanted to rip open servers with my bare hands and p

I felt a dizzy mix of gratitude and anger. Gratitude because he’d thought of a way to shield our lives. Anger because he’d chosen secrecy and kept me out of the loop. Those two plates did not cancel each other out. They clinked.“You should’ve told me,” I said, not because he owed me accounting but because we were trying to build something honest — a taboo affair that needed more truth than the rest of my life.“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”The apology was a small, honest thing he did like plucking a splinter from my palm. I leaned into him because he had just offered me an entire private world: a legal buffer anchored by love.He laughed then, a low sound. “There’s another part,” he added, and the look in his eyes made my stomach tingle like the first prelude of thunder. “Because you deserve to know how ridiculous I am when I want something — I didn’t just buy the stake. I also… set a clause. If anything ever happened to Tom — and if you wanted it— a clause allowed me temporary gua

I felt the world tilt, not like an earthquake but like a subtle, inevitable swing. The air in the room thinned and then filled with something that had no name at first: an electric that felt like every choice we’d made and every risk we’d taken. I sat on the bed in silence as if silence itself might help contain what had happened. Marcus watched me like a man in a small chapel waiting to hear a confession he could not judge. “Well?” he asked, and it was the softest of all the commands he’d ever given me. I reached for his hand and placed the stick beside him like an offering. He looked at it, and then at me, and something in his face cracked open into a fierce tenderness I’d only glimpsed in war rooms and quiet hospital corridors. “You’re laughing,” he said, because I had unclenched and there was a sound that escaped me, half laugh, half sob. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to laugh,” I said. “I don’t know if I should be terrified or ecstatic.” He took me in his arms immediately, a

We laughed until it felt ridiculous and perfect. There was an ease to planning with him like this — not the surgical strategies of weeks past but the small, domestic conspiracies that felt like a future being shaped in private: where to put a bookshelf, whether to get a dog (we argued and then capitulated to a very small rescue named Bix), what color to paint a room if we ever allowed ourselves the audacity of painting.The day moved toward the evening with the lazy ease of something that could be paused like a favorite song. We packed a small bag — linen shirts, a ridiculous number of swim suits represented by me, a selection of his ties I swore to never touch — and left the penthouse with the lightness of people who were slipping out the back door of their own lives to test a new neighborhood.The drive north was a low, rolling thing. Marcus never talked much while he drove; his attention became a contained, warm silence I liked to sit in. I watched him more than watched the trees.

We planned in ridiculous details — names of dishes, the kind of coffee we’d drink, whether to adopt Bix the rescue dog. The day blurred into softness and then into the delicious tension of not-quite-finished errands. There was an intimacy in deciding a future, in making small promises, that felt more serious than any public vow. We were packing a bag when the front door opened with a soft, familiar creak. Tom. He stood framed in the hallway like a photograph from a life I’d once assumed would be simple. He looked older than the last time I’d seen him in the flesh — the weeks had aged him like a tree storm-bent — but there was an unmistakable steadiness in his posture. For a second I thought he might leave, might just be a kindly, checking-in ghost. Instead he crossed the room in two strides and took Marcus’s face in both hands. My breath stalled. “You kept him safe,” Tom said, voice thick in a way I’d never heard. “You did what you said you would. You kept my daughter safe.” Mar