Todos os capítulos de Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance : Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

The Moscow summit was a steel and glass citadel of whispered authority. Inside the soaring atrium of the Gorod Stolits Tower, it was a temperature of seventy degrees exact, smog-filtered and with the low, rumbling thrum of global energy politics pumped in. Men and women who controlled pipelines and brokered markets commuted between translation booths and coffeebars, their handshakes firm, their smiles falling short of their eyes. Davidson shoved through the crowd at Joe's right side, a presence now impossible to miss. On his hand, the signet ring was a stone, cold fact. He felt the glances, the tentative double-takes, the calculating stares that rested not on his face, but on his hand. He had spent the morning in back-to-back meetings with Gazprom officials, his Russian impeccable, his grasp of volumetric production allowances perfect. He was playing wonderfully, the model heir.The ring was doing its job: it was silencing queries about his right to be there by announcing his right to

Brison Energy's boardroom was a platform of unyielding domination. Sunlight filtering through forty-second-floor windows dazzled off the highly polished surface of the Brazilian rosewood table, which had witnessed the ratification of wars, the takeover of continents, and the clandestine destruction of competitors. On this day, it was a platform for a single, brutal act.Davidson sat at one end, his shoulders loaded with the collective attention of the room. There was not greedy speculation such as Moscow, but rather more severe, more dangerous scrutiny. They were not gossips; they were stakeholders in human capital and felt their interest threatened. The twelve men and three women around the board table were the very embodiment of the firm's institutional conscience—penurious, ruthless, and unbendingly sensitive to scandal.Joe sat in the head seat, a king whose reckoning had arrived. His face was a stone mask of unchanging indifference, but Davidson felt the strain in the white-knuck

The forty-second-story boardroom, usually a temple of cool, calculated authority, was a pressure cooker waiting to burst. The air was thick with high-priced coffee, starched cotton, and pent-up fury. The polished, mahogany table now reflected only division, not unity.Davidson's team sat on one side of it. Arthur Crighton, the lead independent director, was their unexpected anchor. His support was not from the heart, but from cold pragmatism. To his side were Elizabeth Stirling, head of mergers and acquisitions, a woman in her fifties who had seen Davidson's strategic mind at close quarters and respected it. To her right, the younger, more progressive members—the CFO who saw the fiscal logic in a stable succession, the chief technology officer who was impressed by Davidson's plan for the future. Theirs was a support of the head, not the heart. They saw Victor as an artifact of destabilization.Opposite them at the table was Victor's bloc. They were the old guard, the men—and they were

The "neutral space" was the playroom at a community center that smelled of antiseptic wipes and stale crayons. It was a safe room, but to Davidson, it was a fine torture chamber. Every second Tuesday, 4:00 until 5:30 PM, he got to be a father.Ms. Gable, the monitor who had been assigned, sat in a plastic chair in the corner of the room, a clipboard perched on her knee. She was a woman in her fifties with a soft, always melancholy face, her job less that of a guard and more that of a witness to a slow-motion collapse. She would pretend to read a magazine, giving them a facade of privacy.Today, the space between them was a physical wall.Nine-year-old Mark sat at a low table, carefully putting a model airplane together. His forehead was creased in a focus that was so much like Davidson's own it was a physical pain. But he didn't glance up. He grunted monosyllables to Davidson's queries regarding school, regarding soccer."Fine." "Yeah." "I guess.Six-year-old Lily was quieter. She col

The Alaskan retreat, its nipping air and whispering pines, had been a temporary balm for the soul. Cyberspace, however, knew no borders. The news alert arrived in Joe's secure satellite phone just after dawn, a jarring, buzzing intrusion into the quiet. Davidson was out on the deck, watching an eagle circle the cove, trying to steal a moment's peace before the day's strategy sessions. He saw Joe's posture change in the glass doors—a faint stiffening, a slow, deliberate scanning of the screen.Joe didn't call him in. He came out, the phone held loosely in his hand. His face was grim."Melissa," he said, the single word dripping with a world of implication. "She's given an interview. To Aura magazine."Aura. Not a tabloid, not a business newspaper. A mainstream, glossy women's magazine with a reputation for long profiles and sympathetic profiles. It was the perfect forum. A tabloid could be dismissed as trash. Aura would lend her story a hint of respectable tragedy.Davidson took the ph