Semua Bab Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance : Bab 191 - Bab 200

The invitation was to a "special announcement" and had been faxed to all the major networks. It hadn't taken place in a TV studio, though, but in the living room of the house that Davidson had bought for them in a more subdued, tree-lined part of Connecticut. The setting was a deliberately roughened, unfriendly opposite of his penthouse glass and steel existence. This was a normalcy set, a family set, for all he was being made to see that he'd smashed.Davidson could not watch. It was a trap laid with his own heart. Not watching, however, seemed to him even greater cowardice. He had to see the knife she was brandishing. He had to behold his own execution as a father.He stood alone in the blackness of his study, the giant screen glowing like a malevolent eye. The camera panned across the room he knew so well—the flower-upholstered sofa he'd chosen with her, the bookcase filled with albums, the hearth where they'd hung the stockings. It was a monument to a life he could no longer have.

The previous forty-eight hours since the argument had been a death march. The silence between Davidson and Joe was no longer just heavy; it was polar, a frozen desert in the center of the penthouse. They walked on eggs around each other with the tense, cautious precision of bomb disposal experts, communicating only through stilted emails and messages relayed by an expressionless assistant. Their shared bed remained unslept in.The affair, once the focus of Davidson's new existence, was a reminder of his old life.Now, standing before the polished black door of the Brian Energy boardroom, Davidson felt that character had been stripped down to its skeleton. He was not the protégé or the lover or even the infamous heir. He was a defendant standing trial.Joe stood a few feet away, his gaze directed straight ahead at the door as if he could see through it to the war zone outside. He was every inch the king – razor-sharp Brioni suit, his very posture an imperious command that challenged

Davidson Ekon went missing for three days. The media, having feasted on his presumed cowardice, declared he'd fled the country. Legal experts speculated he was negotiating a deal with prosecutors. Online trolls Photoshopped his picture onto wanted posters. The narrative was set in concrete: the Scandalous Heir, with his hand in the cookie jar, had cut and run.In a sterile, rented conference room in an anonymous midtown law firm, Davidson was not campaigning. He was preparing for war.He had not spoken to Joe.The recollection of the doubt in Joe's eyes was a scar on his soul, a pain more pointed than any headline.But that pain had undergone a chemical change.It had been refined in the crucible of his despair, changed from leaden shame to cold, hard steel.Joe's doubt had been the final, necessary lesson.No one was going to save him.The throne was not going to be handed to him; it had to be seized.His weapons were not the Brian Energy legal team, who were scrambling to attempt to

The announcement was not delivered in a whisper but with the cold, clinical finality of a judge's gavel. In a move that had the media cycle spinning, still parsing his masterclass press conference, Davidson Ekon filed a lawsuit. Not a defensive crouch or a plea for sympathy. A war cry, inscribed in legalese and delivered with the calculated precision of a tactical strike.The documents, filed simultaneously in state and federal court, were a masterpiece of savage elegance. The plaintiff: simply "Davidson Ekon." The defendants: "Victor Brandt and Melissa Ekon."The charges were Defamation, Tortious Interference with Contractual and Business Relations, and Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress. The dollar amount requested was astronomical, enough to bankrupt Victor personally and ruin Melissa's future, but everyone who read the petition knew the money wasn't the goal. The goal was devastation.Joe discovered along with the rest of the world: via news alert on his phone. He was in

The war room was no longer the shiny boardroom. It had relocated to Joe's private study in the penthouse, a refuge once reserved for contemplative silence, now littered with the debris of war. Legal briefs teetered in dangerous stacks on the Persian rug. Financial projections were taped across the bookshelves, obscuring leather-bound classics. The air was thick with the scent of cold coffee and simmering tension.They had been at it for six hours. Davidson, his shirtsleeves rolled up, was pacing with a tireless, purposeful energy. Joe, however, had grown quieter as the night wore on. He was sitting in his high-backed leather chair, a throne he was seeming to shrink into. The brash confidence that had marked him for so many years had been stripped away by months of unrelenting pressure. The suit, the board's treachery, the poison pen of Liam Croft—it was death by a thousand cuts, and the hemorrhaging was beginning to take its toll. "We counter-attacked on the grooming story with a def