All Chapters of Hearts at the Helm:A Billionaire's Gamble on Love: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

Penthouse silence was no longer one of absence, but of focus. The anarchic energy of breakdown had been replaced by a deep, thrumming concentration. Robert Clarkson was facing the large window, but he was no longer looking at the city as a lost kingdom. He was looking at it as a board, and he was preparing to make the final, most reckless move of his life.The evidence against Harper was procured. The man was embarrassed, suspended, an unperson from the machine. And yet the victory felt tenuous, incomplete. The earth under the world remained uncertain because the earth of his own life remained fractured. He had offered Jonah his heart, and it had been met with a silence that was neither welcoming nor refusal, but a limbo that was its own special kind of agony.He had not slept with books, but with recollections. He recalled the painting in Jonah's workshop—the single figure on the ghost ship. He recalled Jonah's words, his denunciations that Clarkson had looked upon their partnership

The boardroom door had never looked so much like the entrance to a coliseum. Robert Clarkson stood before it, the stifled screams of rage muffled by a dull roar against the highly polished wood. He had gambled on everything. He had gambled his empire, his reputation, his very sanity, on the scales for the man he loved. And now he was going to go in there alone and face the lions.He took a soothing breath, hands on the cold brass handle. This was when he would be torn apart, or…The door cracked open from the other side.Jonah Magnus stood there.He was not dressed in his typical learned dishevelment, but in a severe, black suit that made him look like a razor edge. His face was pale, but tranquil, his eyes still, appallingly clear. He was holding one, worn, leathery old journal.For a heart-stopping instant, they simply stared at one another in the still anteroom. Clarkson's mind reeled. How? Why? Stiles must have told him. He had betrayed the plan, and Jonah had come… to stop him? T

The huge oak door to the penthouse clicked shut, and the world—with its boardrooms, its intimidations, its blaring presses and quiet, judgmental eyes—slid away. The only sound was the gentle, city-muted hum of the elevator going down, leaving them in the profound stillness of their own space.They stood just inside the doorway, a foot of shining marble floor between them, the air thick with the aftermath of the earthquake they'd just survived and caused. The adrenaline that had kept them going through the battle was wearing off, leaving behind a hollow, trembling exhaustion. Robert Clarkson's shoulders, which had been set in a line of belligerent strength for hours, now slumped. The bandage on his temple was a grim reminder of the cost.Jonah Magnus seemed to have been stripped to the bone. The man of great words, the unafraid thinker who had left a room full of ruling men speechless, did not seem to exist. There was instead a pale man drained of overwrought emotion, his eyes haunted

The storm broke at dawn, and it was not made up of rain, but of ink. The tightly managed press release from Clarkson Industries, announcing the "historic strategic partnership with the Magnus Institute," was a lit match tossed into a container of petrol. Public conversation, so recently focused on Harper's death, whiplashed with a brutal, public whiplash.Not just critical, the headlines were apoplectic."MAGNUS MADNESS: CLARKSON SEALS OCCULT BOND!" The Chronicle screamed, Pendleton's byline a flashback to the fewer and farther-between friends of Harper, seizing their moment for payback."FROM BOARDROOM TO SÉANCE: SHAMED CEO ADOPTS THE ABYSS," The Financial Times blared, its usually placid pages now hosting an almost frenetic op-ed. The tawdrier the papers became unhinged. "LOVE SPELL? CLARKSON GAVE KEYS TO MYSTIC FLAME!" screamed one, over a blurry, uncomplimentary photo of Jonah departing the Institute, collar turned up against the cold. The airwaves were clogged with the same bedla

The tranquility was fleeting. One quiet day, a fragile bubble of peace in the penthouse, insulated from the fiscal wreckage and public humiliation. They had spent it in virtual quiet, hardly a word spoken, just re-learning the contours of each other's presence. The world, however, had not finished with them.It arrived not with a headline shout, but a whisper. An plain, unsealed envelope, brought by a delivery man who had materialized and vanished so quickly he was hardly seen. On the penthouse welcome mat, a white square of pure malevolence. Robert Clarkson's hand trembled over it, his stomach already a cold knot of fear. He knew, with a sense of foreboding like a death warrant, who it was from.There was nothing written on the inside. No message. Just one, solitary, typewritten page—a transcript—and a black-and-white, grainy photograph.The photograph showed a twenty-years-younger Robert Clarkson, his face unlined by the troubles of an empire, his hair more substantial. He was shaki