Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Secret Billionaire Heiress Strikes Back : Kabanata 161 - Kabanata 170

Chapter 161"I know what it is," she said, and something in her voice finally cracked too, just slightly, just enough to show him the fear she'd been keeping level under the explanation. "I'm not pretending it isn't terrifying. I've been sitting with this for the last twenty minutes trying to find a version of telling you that makes it sound smaller than it is, and there isn't one. It's exactly as big and as bad as it sounds. But I'm not going to sit in this apartment pretending to wait for news while you're out there with a man who's already proven he doesn't mind hurting people in front of children to make a point. I can't do that. I won't survive doing that, Dante, not really — not the part of me that matters."He looked at her. Something in his face softened, the fear still there but reorganizing itself into something closer to recognition — the specific recognition of seeing your own logic reflected back at you from someone you love, the argument you'd have made yourself if the p

Chapter 163The invitation arrived the way most things arrived at Rhys's level of the world — quietly, expensively, with no return address and no explanation of how the sender had gotten his private line. It came as a single embossed card slid into a black envelope, delivered by hand to Sarah's desk by a courier who hadn't waited for a signature, and it sat on Rhys's desk for two full days before he opened it, because his instinct for anything arriving without a clear sender was to let it wait until curiosity outweighed caution.When he finally opened it, the card inside was simple. Heavy stock, gold foil lettering, no logo, no company name — just a date, a time, an address that meant nothing printed plainly and a phrase underneath it that meant everything to the small world that understood it.*The King's Race. Masks required. This invitation is non-transferable.*Rhys read it once, set it down, and felt nothing beyond the mild, distant amusement of a man being invited to something h

Chapter 165 Aspen's invitation arrived the same way Rhys's had — by hand, no return address, gold foil on black — except hers came with a small handwritten note tucked inside, three words in a careful, deliberate script: *Miles will explain.*She found Miles in his study that evening, a glass of something amber already in his hand, his posture loose in the particular way it got when he was pleased about something and hadn't decided yet how much of his pleasure to show."You got one too," he said, before she'd even finished crossing the room, nodding at the envelope in her hand."What is this," Aspen said, holding it up. "The King's Race? Some kind of charity thing?"Miles laughed, low, the sound carrying an edge of condescension he didn't bother to hide from her anymore. "It's not a charity thing. It's better than that. It's an investment opportunity, if you know how to read it correctly.""Explain it like I don't already know ho

Chapter 167The venue revealed itself slowly, the way expensive secrets always did — first as nothing, an unmarked stretch of road outside the city where the streetlights thinned and the GPS insisted there was nothing ahead but warehouses and dark fields, and then, abruptly, as everything at once.The track sat in what had once been an industrial complex, repurposed sometime in the last decade by people with the money and the disregard for permits required to turn abandoned concrete into something that could host two thousand people without a single regulatory body knowing it existed. Floodlights ringed the perimeter, throwing the track itself into stark white relief against the dark sprawl of the old buildings around it. Cars filled an enormous makeshift lot — luxury vehicles parked with valet precision, drivers in dark suits directing traffic with the smooth efficiency of men who did this often enough to have it down to a science.Dante drove them in slo

Chapter 169 Marcello moved through his own event the way a king moved through a court he'd built specifically to flatter him — unhurried, unmasked, a glass of something dark in one hand, stopping every few feet to exchange a word with someone who mattered enough to warrant the pause. He wore a plain suit, expensive but understated, the specific understatement of a man who didn't need ornamentation to be recognized as the most important person in the room.He'd been watching the crowd for the better part of an hour, the way he always did before a race — not for entertainment, but for information. A man learned things by watching a crowd that he never learned by watching a track. Who stood near whom. Who avoided whom. Who carried themselves like they had something to prove and who carried themselves like they'd already proven it years ago and were simply waiting for everyone else to remember.His eyes caught on a figure near the bar — a man, mask