All Chapters of Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

The small studio was its own world, one planet, spinning in an empty, frigid space. The only sounds were the hiss of the gas lamp, the scratch of the nib, and the harsh, unconscious rhythm of Jonah Magnus's own breathing. Canvases leaned against the walls, raw and grotesque, the physical manifestation of his pain. But this evening, the storm in him had altered from savage to barren. The fury had dwindled to embers, and only a pale, icy ash of despair remained.He sat alone at a simple wooden table, a single sheet of inexpensive, unlined paper before him. A pen, an ink bottle. These were his tools now, not to record the words of someone else, but to excavate his own.He began to write. Not with the careful composure of the Institute's director, or the sharp intellectual precision of the scholar. This was a more laborious, more primal script, the words pulled into being out of a wound.Robert,I don't know why I'm writing this. You will never read it. To send it would be a weakness, and

The storm, as it exploded, did not thunder. It arrived in the hard, practical clang of a newspaper fallen onto a marble surface, and the frantic ringing of telephones. It was an inkblizzard and a wire report blizzard, and at the center of it all was a paper so damning that it seemed to suck the air out of every room it invaded.Alaric Harper, master dramatist of timing, had saved his masterpiece for the climactic ending.It was a contract. A neatly worded, lawyer-phrased contract, worn to a credible yellow at the edges, embossed with the mark of a defunct Zurich bank house. It detailed a loan of astronomical sums, payable to one Jonah Magnus, and the Magnus Institute as security. The rates of the repayment were usurious, the penalties draconian. But it was the named co-signatory, the name which caused every financier in the city to gasp, which caused the scandal to blow into a cataclysm: Robert Clarkson, Clarkson Industries.Worst of all, attached as an appendix, was a letter of perso

The atmosphere at The Compass and Quill was thick with the smell of old wood, cheap liquor, and the desperate silence of men with nowhere else to go. It was a venue unfrequented by the gilded circle of clubs and galas, a sanctuary for those living on the intellectual and social periphery of London. In the back of a wood-scoured booth, lost in darkness, Jonah Magnus sat facing the only man he still, hesitantly, called a friend.Alistair Finch was a holdover from Jonah's college days, a man who'd chosen the simple life of a rare book dealer over the tainted currents of institutional power. He was bearded and solid, with a silent, down-to-earth common sense that had always acted as a brake on Jonah's soaring, occasionally hazardous, mind. His premises were just across the street from the pub, and he had found Jonah there an hour before, a specter hanging over the life he had abandoned."They're calling it the Magnus Folly in the night editions," Jonah said, his tone raw, scrawny scrape.

The photographs lay strewn in chaos across the desk of Robert Clarkson like shards of a shattered world, to be fitted together again and forced into a new, hellish reality. The pale morning light pouring through the blinds of his private study seemed too mundane, too ordinary, to throw on such damning evidence.Edward Stiles said not a word, merely placed the small, flat camera on the desk and departed, his task fulfilled. For what seemed an eternity, Clarkson had merely stared at the object, his own heart a frantic, penned bird against his chest. Now, he examined the fruit of his wild gamble.He'd longed to feel vindication. A surge of virtuous triumph. But what built in him was icy, tectonic fury, so profound it was almost silent.The first photographs were of the workshop itself. The light tables, the magnifying lamps, the jars of pigment. It was a clinic where reality was surgically altered. Then the practice forgeries—Jonah's sharp, vertical script reproduced with care, the maste

The twist of the studio door's lock came with a sound unfamiliar and yet somehow known. For a moment, Robert Clarkson stood in the doorway, his heart a frenzied, frustrated drum against the side of him. He'd been here no more than a month. Before, he'd been a man sinking under his own kingdom's collapse. And now, he was a man who possessed a truth that he believed could remake the world, close all gaps.The air he entered was heavy with the smells of turpentine, oil paint, and dust. It was the smell of a world which he had never fully understood, but a world to which he had become attuned with Jonah. The room was as stripped as he remembered it, but now it was filled by the paintings. They clung to each wall, cowered in the shade—untidy, dark, and crude. They were neither portraits nor landscapes by any conventional meaning; they were colours and forms of wounds. He beheld slashes of outraged scarlet, puddles of dark despairing blue, and bodies that seemed to tear themselves apart. On