Lahat ng Kabanata ng Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance : Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 50

The Tribeca loft was where they were meant to discover their refuge. Melissa had designed every inch of it herself—the kitchen with the Carrara marble island, the low-to-the-ground sofa in a plush pile positioned for maximum views of the Hudson River, the wall of photographs chronicling their life from college dormitory to Jake's first steps to Sarah's gap-toothed smile. It was a celebration of their life together, a tasteful museum of what they'd built as a couple. But lately, it had felt less of a refuge and more like a tastefully decorated set upon which her husband was performing the role of himself.He was distracted. Not his typical manner, not the dashing, absent-minded professor image he'd projected in grad school when he'd been lost in a model of economics. This was different. This was a suffocating, unsettling absence. He was physically present—situated in his chair at the dinner table, helping Jake with his math homework, listening to Sarah's rumors about her science projec

Outside, in the world beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of Brian's office, was a tapestry of light, a galaxy of human activity that extended to the horizon. Inside, the only light came from one brass desk lamp, its warm, intimate glow casting across the spread of documents that made up the Dubai acquisition. The rest of the vast room was dark, the abstract sculpture and minimalist bookcases fading into darkness. It was past midnight.The normal hum of the building had fallen to a heavy, near-tangible vibration, the rumble of a sleeping giant.They had worked at it for hours, refining the ultimate plan, planning out each possible counterstroke by the Al-Sharif clan. Davidson's mind was a tightly wound spring of focus, each neuron firing in unison with the man across from him. It was the peak of their partnership—a meeting of two minds, operating in a universe of strategy and leverage that seemed, in its precision, to be some sort of high art.Brian leaned forward, finger tracing a li

The storm had blown in out of nowhere, a biblical fury of wind and snow that descended upon Geneva with savage intent. It wasn't the gentle, postcard snowfall; it was a white fury that consumed the city, silencing its buzz, grounding its flights, and plunging its streets into a deep, muffled silence. At the Four Seasons, the generators had kicked in, but management, in a surfeit of caution, had cut off all but the most essential circuits in the suites. The royal penthouse was dimmed to a weak, darkish semi-darkness, the eternal vista of the Alps and the lake erased behind a wall of implacable white.The world had narrowed to the size of a room. Their room.The initial professional annoyance—calls not returned, deals stalled—had long since dissolved, replaced by a peculiar, pressured intimacy. There was no escape. No office to return to, no meetings to attend, no city to get lost in. They were trapped together in the opulent jail, with nothing but the wailing wind for company.Brian, e

The flight back from Geneva was a journey into another man. The man who looked out of the window of the private jet at the endless expanse of Atlantic cloud cover was a different man from the one who had flown east just a few days before. That man had been conflicted, yes, beset by moral crises and a stressing loyalty. But he knew who he was. A husband. A father. A protégé.Now, the cornerstone of that identity felt like shifting sand.He replayed the scenes in the hidden room behind the library, each one an earthquake to his system. The paintings of kings and lovers. The intimate letters. The locked diary. But more than the artifacts themselves, it was Joe Brian's face as he revealed them—a face of awful, complete vulnerability mixed with defiant pride. It was the face of a man showing its true face for the first time, waiting to be adored or hated.And Davidson, to his own horror, had felt a surge of something that was not disgust, was not pity, but a profound and terrible awe. It w

Victor Brandt was not a man who relied on intuition. He relied on patterns. Intuition was for artists and fools; patterns were the universe's language, a code that, if broken, exposed the inner mechanics of power, ambition, and weakness. And the pattern emerging between Joseph Brian and his golden boy, John Davidson, was becoming increasingly difficult to disregard.From his own corner office on a lower floor—a big but secondary nonetheless, a constant, festering insult for a decade—Brandt watched. He was a student of the Brian empire, and his primary subject was its emperor. He had files, not computerized but in his brain, recording Brian's habits, his alliances, his ruthlessness, and his occasional, uncharacteristic softnesses.The softness in Davidson was the most fascinating and unsettling pattern of all. It had started insidiously. The extra five minutes in the elevator after a meeting. The private debriefings that lasted long after other executives had been dismissed. But latel