All Chapters of Married to the billionaire by contract : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The council room smelled the way it always did in Elena’s memory now—coffee and formal air, the soft rustle of paper, the tension that settled like dust when important people gathered. Damian sat at the long table, shoulders squared, suit immaculate though there was an exhaustion in his eyes Elena had rarely seen: the kind of tired that comes from sleepless nights spent trying to keep both a company and a person afloat.He had gone alone, as requested, but he had left Elena with instructions and an insistence that she stay put. “Stay with Maria,” he had said. “Keep the records at your side. Do not go anywhere until I call.” His voice had been both command and plea.She had promised, and now she sat in the living room with a quiet that felt too loud. The house hummed with activity despite her enforced stillness—Hannah on her tablet, Maria straightening cups, Victoria moving like a shadow between phone calls and folders. Elena watched Victoria, the woman’s posture smooth and controlled,

The intercom’s chime still echoed in Elena’s ears when Hannah opened the door, a practiced smile on her face that didn’t quite mask the tension in her eyes; the house had been on edge all day. Elena smoothed her skirt with hands that trembled a little and tried to breathe like someone trying to steady a small boat in choppy water. Maria hovered nearby, apron folded like armor, and the living room felt both too big and too small—too big because it was exposed to officials and too small because it held everything Elena had chosen and risked.Mr. Brecht entered first, the council liaison who had the knack for appearing unobtrusively official. He wore a navy suit, a ledger tucked under his arm, and that expression officials keep for moments where facts must be pulled from people without causing them to feel trampled. Behind him were two other representatives, quieter, with pads and pens ready. They took chairs as if they were settling into the neutral ground of a hearing.“Elena Carter?”

The forensic lab had moved with quiet efficiency, the kind of professional calm that tries to make catastrophe manageable. Damian sat at the far end of the council table, fingers interlaced, the small tremor in his hands hidden by the dark cuff of his suit. Elena waited in the living room with Hannah and Maria, pacing in a way that looked like movement because stillness felt dangerous. Victoria stayed near the phones, poised and ready, the engine room of her mind already cataloguing legal routes.Damian watched the technician lift the small USB drive from its evidence bag and set it on a sterile tray. The drive had E.C. scrawled on a strip of masking tape in hurried handwriting; the same initials that had become the fulcrum of this afternoon. A hush hovered in the council room—papers rustled, people breathed the same air of contained dread.“Once we image the device and run a checksum,” the technician explained, “we can preserve the original and work on the copy. Any file timestamps a

Elena had not planned to see Victoria alone. The woman’s presence in the house had been a constant—precise heels, exacted calm, the soft rustle of paperwork whenever a crisis needed smoothing—but today Elena wanted answers and she wanted them without the machinery of lawyers and council hovering between them.Victoria found her in the small sitting area by the window, where Elena often sat to sketch ideas for the designs she dreamed she might make someday. The city lay outside in a bright, indifferent shimmer. Inside, Elena felt like a small thing under glass.“Mrs. Carter,” Victoria said, and the name sounded formal even when her tone softened. “May I join you?”Elena nodded. Her heart had been a wild bird all day—flitting between panic and a brittle, exhausted hope. “Please,” she said. “I thought you were at the hospital.”Victoria set her small leather folder on the coffee table and sat with the same composed posture she wore in the boardroom. Up close, she looked less like an imag

The hallway felt too bright and too small, the late afternoon sun slicing through the glass and casting long shards of light across the marble; Elena’s chest felt heavy like a drawer full of things she could not sort. Damian stood near the foyer, suit trembling at the shoulders from the recent storm—his composure frayed but his posture still the old, ordered habit. He held himself like a man trying to remember how to be steady.Luis sat on the small bench by the entrance, hands folded, eyes avoiding the rooms with their curious faces. He had the look of someone who had been walked through every polite interrogation and had finally decided there was no point in hiding anymore. Maria hovered nearby with a cup of tea, her face soft but taut with worry. Hannah kept her tablet close, fingers poised to record, the professional calm that had kept the household together at crisis.“You said you didn’t do it alone,” Damian said quietly, the question a blade of glass—simple, direct, and necessa