All Chapters of Married to the billionaire by contract : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

The conference room smelled faintly of coffee and lemon polish, a domestic cleanliness that tried too hard to be comforting. Elena sat at the far end of the table, fingers wrapped around a paper cup until the rim had an imprint of her thumb. Her hazel eyes kept drifting to the window where the city smeared into evening — lights like scattered promises.“You look exhausted.” Damian’s voice came from her left before she heard his footstep. He moved like someone who had learned to own the space he took: deliberate, careful, and impossibly composed. Today his suit jacket hung loose at the shoulders, as if he had tried to soften for the evening and still retained the silhouette of command. The gray of his eyes was more present than usual, lighter in the artificial light, and when he reached her chair he rested his palm on the back of it — a small, claiming gesture that made Elena feel, absurdly, less alone.“I am,” she admitted. The words came out small, honest. Her life had been carved in

The room felt like a held breath. Even the city outside the windows seemed to lower its volume. Everyone’s eyes were on the small rectangle of glass where the intruder’s thumb hovered like a poised actor waiting to drop the curtain.“Play it,” the detective said. His voice was tight but practiced, the tone officers use when they are trying to keep protocol above panic.The intruder smiled like someone who’d enjoyed every moment of the build-up. “You sure you want to see this?” he asked, not because he thought they would turn away, but because he wanted to savor their faces.Elena didn’t answer. Her hand was a stone in Damian’s palm, fingers gripping tight enough to leave pale crescents. She felt light-headed, like she’d been underwater and just surfaced. Ethan’s face floated in her mind — sleepy, trusting — and it made everything else hurt sharper.Damian kept his grip, the pressure steady and protective, and answered instead. “Yes.” His voice was low and flat. “Play it.”The intruder

The newsroom glow in the lobby felt like a bruise: bright, intrusive, impossible to ignore. Elena kept her hand tucked into Damian’s sleeve like a child’s anchor as they navigated the flow of people who already had opinions and questions on their faces. Cameras that hadn’t been there in the morning gathered like hungry moths; flashes popped and died in quick bursts that made Elena’s head spin. Every lens felt like a judgement.“Stay close,” Damian murmured in a tone that was both instruction and comfort. He moved with that practiced calm that made employees fall into step around him, and for a second Elena took the comfort like a remedy. His presence was a steadying line she could lean against.They reached the inner office where Victoria had taken command. Her blazer was perfectly pressed, her voice disciplined. “We’ll do a brief statement, two lines,” she said before they could sit. “We acknowledge an inquiry. We do not speculate. Anything beyond that goes to counsel.”Beatrice flit

The room was a pressure cooker that had finally had the weight valve opened. The image of Alexander Kingstone’s face in the passenger seat hovered on Jonah’s screen like a thing that would not be exhaled. For a long, terrible second nobody spoke. Air seemed to congeal.“Elena,” Damian said finally, and it was not a question. His voice had gone thin with something like grief and a brittle, raw anger. He always sounded decisive — the way he carried himself, the way people listened when he gave an order — but in that moment the usual control had cracked. He reached across, took her hand, and the contact was quiet, intimate, urgent.She felt his fingers the way someone feels a lighthouse through fog: a steadying point she could reach for. “I saw him,” she whispered, though everyone had seen him. “That’s him.”Victoria’s voice cut in, sharp and precise, the kind of voice that organizes panic into action. “We do not say more publicly than necessary,” she said. “We need to verify, secure, an

“You owe me nothing.”“No,” Damian said. He was standing in the center of a small room that smelled faintly of lemon polish and paper—Beatrice’s office, the one with the low couch where they had once argued about indemnity clauses and later sat in silence together. “I owe you everything.”Elena pressed her palm flat against the desk, feeling the grain under her fingers. She could see the man he had been—the suit, the lean lines, the boardroom posture—but she could also see the man he was trying to be: tired, raw, focused. His gray eyes had lost their business-cold sheen and gained something softer. “You could give the apology to the wind and it would still be nothing,” she said. “Words don’t fix bones, Damian.”He swallowed. “No. They don’t. But I have been trying to fix what I can. I—” He stopped, as if the sentence might break into a thousand jagged pieces if he finished it. He breathed and forced the rest out like a negotiation. “I have resigned from the company. I have put my name