All Chapters of Bound by Fortune :A Scandalous Heir Billionaire Romance : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

It was long past midnight, when the world outside the penthouse windows had dwindled to a few solitary cruising taxis and the constant, low-grade drone of a city that never quite slept. It was another type of quiet inside—thick, focused, and charged with the anticipation of the work to be done. The Dubai acquisition documents, all two hundred pages of them, were spread across the vast expanse of Joe Brian's desk like the dismembered components of some complex financial engine. Davidson was in the zone, that realm of pure, liquid concentration where time warps and the self disappears, and all that is left is the problem and the solution. He was cross-referencing a liability clause with an environmental impact report, his finger tracing a line of dense text, his brain building and demolishing legal structures. Brian was pacing behind him, a panther stalking its prey, reading from another pile of papers, his voice a low, even growl that had become the background hum of Davidson's focus.

The air in the boardroom of Brian Worldwide was always tenuous, oxygenated not with plant life but with raw, distilled drive. It was here that fortunes were made and lost on the phrase of a sentence, where one cell in an Excel spreadsheet could seal the fate of thousands. Today the mood was more charged than ever. Davidson's triumph, the Dubai takeover, rested before the full board for final approval. It should have been a coronation.Victor Brandt had other plans.He had waited patiently, a spider on the edge of his web. The paparazzi photo, the rumors, the quiet but telling shift in Brian's regard for his protégé—it had all provided the perfect venom. He did not have a star in the making, but a blinding vulnerability in his competitor's armor, and he intended to strike at the most public, most humiliating moment of all.Davidson sat at the table's head, beside Brian, guiding the board's elite members—former senators, former CEOs, banking moguls—through the last terms. He spoke with

The leather-bound notebook was a small rebellion. It was not his workaday tablet, nor the family schedule on the kitchen fridge. This was personal, discretionary, analog. He had bought it at a busy, dusty stationery store in the Village, the kind that reeked of ink and old paper, light-years from the glass-and-steel reasonableness of his day-to-day life. Its cover was a dark, plush navy, blank and awaiting. It was heavily weighted in his hands.He had stopped praying. The words had lost their sense, echoing in the corners of his heart that seemed increasingly hollow. The pleas—"Lord, give me strength," "Father, direct me," "Remove this cup from me"—were now merely speaking into a disconnected switchboard. His religion, once a rock, had started to feel like a language no longer native to him. It was the man's words he had known, and that man was vanishing, as though a picture left in the sun.The journal was an overture to a new language. His own.The first entry was hesitant, scribble

Jealousy was a peasant emotion. It was for the deprived, for those who feared loss. Joe Brian did not need it. He had. He did not fear loss; he wrought permanence. He had spent a lifetime building up an immunity to such universal weaknesses, building his psyche into a fortress of self-containment. Need was a design flaw he had excised from his own personality with merciless completeness.The virus entered on what appeared to be a harmless vector: a sound.He made his jaw-dropping, blue-moon ceremonial pass through the trading floor—the lion among the hyenas, reminding them of the dominance that kept them alive. The air was its usual brutal symphony of greed and tension, a noise that he usually found as soothing as a lullaby, as it was the voice of his own dominance. His eyes, as they always did, swept the room for his anchor, his talisman: John Davidson.He did locate him. But not stabbing away at his terminal, scanning markets with that brutal, beautiful mind. He was by the coffee ma

Sunday broke not in calm, but in the old, low-grade terror that had been the metronome of Davidson's life. The shattered stillness of the loft was a physical weight. Melissa had not talked to him since the argument. Her communication was a series of scrawled messages on the counter: Jake dentist 3pm. Sarah needs a poster board. The domestic choreography of shared life, devoid of all emotion, all sense of humanity. He was a ghost operating a household.The plan, the fragile, hopeless plan, was to go to church. It was a white flag. A symbol of normalcy. A chance to sit beside his family in the comforting pew, to warble the hymns, to incline his head to pray, and to pretend, for one hour, that the earth under his world wasn't crumbling into sand. He needed it. He needed the ritual, the structure, the false promise of forgiveness. And above all, he needed Melissa to see it.He was fastening his tie, his reflection in the hall mirror a pale imitation of a faithful husband, when his phone v