All Chapters of The Billionaire Husband Who Tried to Kill Me : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Sophia's POVThe conference room had no windows. I noticed that immediately when they led me in. Four walls, a long table, two prosecutors, a court recorder in the corner with her machine, and a glass of water nobody had touched. The kind of room designed to contain a conversation completely. No outside world. No weather. No way to look away from what you were there to do.I sat down and folded my hands on the table and told myself to breathe. The lead prosecutor was a woman named Patricia Chen. Mid forties, dark suit, hair pulled back, the kind of face that gave nothing away without effort. The second prosecutor was younger, a man named Harris who had a notepad and a pen and the careful attentiveness of someone who had been told to listen and was taking it seriously.Patricia Chen looked at me across the table and said, "Ms. Dubois, before we begin I want to confirm that you understand you are here voluntarily, that you have waived your right to have personal counsel present at your

David's POVThe federal building had a particular smell. Old carpet, recycled air, and the specific staleness of a place where serious things happened every day and the walls had absorbed enough of it that you felt it the moment you walked in. I had been in federal buildings before, many times, but always on the peripheral edges of cases. Document reviews, filing procedures, the administrative machinery of law.This was different.This was the center of it. Zara met me in the lobby at eight thirty. She was already carrying two coffees and had her files organized under one arm with the efficiency of someone who had been awake and working for hours before our meeting began.She handed me one of the coffees without a word."How bad is it going to be?" I asked."Complicated," she said. "Which is different from bad. Complicated we can work with."We took the elevator to the fourth floor and were shown into a conference room where Reeves was already seated at the head of the table with two

Marcus’s POVThe cell was smaller than I expected. Six steps from wall to wall. I had counted them the first morning out of habit, the same way I counted rooms before I entered them, the same way I counted votes before a board meeting, Old instincts did not disappear just because the room changed.The bed was hard. The light never fully turned off, just dimmed. Somewhere down the corridor a man was talking to himself in a low, steady voice, and I had learned to tune it out the way you learn to tune out traffic. I had been here nine days.Nine days, and I had already mapped the guards who could be reasoned with and the ones who could not. I had identified which hours the corridor was quiet enough to think in. I had begun, carefully, to rebuild something resembling control inside a space specifically designed to strip it from me.That was the part people never understood about men like me. Give me a boardroom or give me a cell. I would find the architecture of power in either one.Wheel

Emmanuel's POV"Sign here, and everything you built for thirty years no longer belongs only to you."My attorney, Diane Whitfield, slid the document across the table and waited. I looked at it without touching it. Thirty years of my life reduced to a single line waiting for ink."I am aware of what signing means," I said."I know you are. I say it anyway because once this is filed, it cannot be quietly undone. This is not a private arrangement anymore, Emmanuel. The moment we formally acknowledge Olivia Collins as your biological daughter and legal heir, every holding company, every trust, every asset across four continents becomes tied to a name that did not exist in any of your paperwork twenty three years ago.""I understand the stakes.""Do you understand the timeline?" She opened a second folder, thicker than the first. "Verification alone will take weeks. DNA confirmation, though we already have preliminary results, needs to be formally entered. Then the estate reclassification.

Olivia's POVThe voicemail played through twice before I could make myself move. I sat on the edge of the bed with the phone pressed to my ear long after Kofi's voice had stopped, the silence afterward somehow louder than anything he had actually said. Section near a jacaranda tree. Under a name that is not her real name. I go there sometimes.My hands were not steady. I set the phone down on my knee and stared at the wall until David came out of the bathroom, towel over his shoulder, and stopped in the doorway when he saw my face."What happened?""Kofi called," I said. "He left a voicemail." My voice sounded strange to my own ears, thin and far away. "He told me where my mother is buried."David crossed the room and sat down beside me without saying anything else. That was one of the things I had learned to trust about him completely. He never rushed to fill a moment before I was ready to fill it myself."Will you take me," I said. Not quite a question."Right now?""Right now."He