All Chapters of Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The tone of Davidson's education shifted. The leveraged buyout and market penetration lessons were a foundation he learned years earlier. Now, Joe Brian began a new, more refined syllabus. No longer was it how one built an empire but how one behaved as an emperor. The classroom transformed into the world itself, and the lessons were no longer told but exemplified.It began at the unveiling of one of the most exclusive artists Brian had secretly subsidized. The room was a cacophony of Manhattan's upper echelons—critics, socialites, wealthy patrons—all scrambling for attention, their voices mounting atop each other in a howl of congratulation. Brian arrived not with fanfare, but with presence. He didn't need to yell to make himself heard. He just. appeared.Davidson stood frozen. Brian moved through the crowd not as another member of the crowd, but as a sculptor moved through his studio. He pursued no conversation, but rather allowed it to accrete around him. A flick of the eye, a tilt

The penthouse office was a pressure cooker. The Dubai acquisition, that gorgeous, behemoth deal, was in its final, most sensitive phase. A last-minute objection had been raised by a small shareholder, a technicality that was more nuisance than threat, but in a deal of this size, even a nuisance could be leveraged into a multi-million-dollar concession. Spreadsheets, legal briefs, and satellite images of the port facility were strewn across Brian's massive desk, a topography of high-stakes worry.Davidson had been talking for a solid ten minutes, taking Brian through a complex three-stage strategy for dealing with the objection. His voice was hoarse from a day of constant negotiating, his mind a tensely wound spring of focus. He was well into the flow of it, the numbers and conditions clicking into place with a comforting logic and inevitability."So, if we apply the environmental impact provision of the 2019 agreement," he concluded, pointing to a dense paragraph on a screen, "and cro

The summons was not accompanied by fanfare, however, but by a simple order. "It's time you saw the entire map," Brian had said, his voice brooking no argument. The venue was not an office or boardroom, but one Davidson had not seen: a sub-level of the Brian Tower, accessible only by a private elevator that required a retinal scan and a twelve-number code Brian punched in with practiced ease.The doors opened not into a sterile server farm, but into a room that could have been the bridge of a starship or an intelligence agency's inner sanctum. The air was cool, pulsing with the whir of climate control and silent, high-powered computers. An entire wall was one large, uninterrupted digital display, now dark. The others were edged by secure filing cabinets of brushed steel and bookshelves lined with leather-bound volumes that looked centuries old."This," Brian said, his voice a little echoey in the immaculate setting, "is the heart of it. The engine room. Everything you read in the annua

The cold war in the attic thawed, not into peace, but into a hot, seething conflict. Melissa's wounded silence had finally burned away, consumed by a gathering storm of suspicion and a raw, furious hunger for the truth. The nonspecific unease had crystallized into a cold, hard certainty: her husband was lying to her. And she was no longer going to be a victim of his deceit; she would be its investigator.It began surreptitiously. Davidson would come home to find his study not exactly as he had left it. A pen had been displaced on his desk. His chair had been moved slightly. He dismissed it as paranoia, a function of his own guilt. But it was reconnaissance.The first direct salvo was fired over a credit card bill. She met him at the door one evening, her face a calm mask of neutrality, one page clutched in her hand.David," she said, her voice ominously flat. "Can you explain this charge from 'Vertigo,' in Geneva? For six hundred francs? The date stamp puts you there during the time o

The Sunday evening sky call to the penthouse, a time traditionally sacrosanct for family, was a detail that could not have been lost on Brian. The loft was still locked in the frozen silence that had followed church. Melissa was closed in the bedroom with the door shut. The children were silent, a movie on with the volume lowered, sensing the frozen rift between their parents. Davidson's phone vibrated on the kitchen counter with a single terse message: Come up. Now.It was more of a reprieve than an invitation. He left the suffocating atmosphere of his own home behind and took the private elevator up, the journey feeling like a journey away from a life that was no longer his.Brian was not in his study but the living room, standing at the big window that faced the sparkling spine of Manhattan. He held a small, antique wooden box, carved with what looked like Celtic knots. He did not turn when Davidson entered.The problem with modern royalty," Brian began, his voice soft, contemplati