All Chapters of Married to the billionaire by contract : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

They all stared at the stairwell feed as if it were Scripture. The camera’s grainy gray caught the hooded figure descending steps in slow, deliberate motion; for a second the profile was nothing more than a shadow. Then the angle changed and Beatrice’s small voice — a thin thread of recognition — cut the room.“That’s Victoria,” she whispered, and the sound stitched everything into a new, raw shape.Elena felt the world tilt. Victoria Hale, legal razor and silk-laced ambition, the woman who had glided around Damian’s life like a winter wind — Victoria, the ex who’d worn smiles like armor — now a hooded figure on a night-vision feed. The absurdity of it made Elena’s stomach drop like a physical thing.Damian’s fingers tightened on hers until she could feel the exact edge of his worry through the touch. “No,” he said at first, a denial like a talisman. Then the tape rolled again and the face turned a fraction, and there was no mistaking the pale cheek, the straight nose, the set of the

The monitor’s alarm cut through the room like a bell. It was a small, high-pitched keening that made everyone start as if someone had touched a raw nerve. Hands moved. Eyes snapped to the console. The blue progress bar in the corner of the screen kept inching toward oblivion.Jackson was already there, voice steady but urgent. “Pause the mirror. Pause anything you can pause. Isolate that IP. Trace it. Pull up the header. We need an origin — now.”The technician’s fingers blurred across the keyboard. “I’m on it. I’ve got a partial route. It’s bouncing through three data centers — two domestic, one overseas. The stream started as an encrypted package at 01:54 and now it’s moving at 120 megabits per second. It’s throttling around redundancy so the system thinks it’s a local replication.”Hale’s jaw tightened. “Who initiated the stream?”The console spit out a line: operator ID V_HALE, token validated, session confirmed. The room breathed like a single animal and then sucked itself tight.

“Elena, breathe,” Damian said, but he said it like a man who needed the breath himself. He had come back wet from the rain and blond hair plastered at his temple; he looked as if the highway had already shaved a year off him. His suit was slightly rumpled, and the tight line at his mouth told a small story she couldn’t stop watching.She let out a laugh that was half sob and half relief. “You think I’ve forgotten how?” she replied. Her voice wanted to be light, but the room hummed with a dozen urgent things — technicians, phones, the small dry clack of keys like teeth. “I can’t breathe at the moment because you keep looking like you might leave again. Sit down.”He sat like it was an order he had been waiting to obey, and when his shoulder brushed hers the contact was a private map. For a fraction of time — a stolen second in the middle of legal and technical chaos — there was the small, ridiculous intimacy of two people who had been thrown into a marriage by contract and then held to

The courthouse smelled like paper and polish and the quiet kind of urgency that only legal places keep. People moved with the serious feet of those who turn life into documents — clerks, ushers, reporters. Elena and Damian arrived side by side, their shoes making the same sound on the marble. Damian’s suit was darker than usual, his tie knotted with that exacting, unshowy precision that had become one of the small things Elena loved about him. He had that lean, controlled look — 6’2”, shoulders set, jaw clenched — that made people either step back or lean in. Tonight, they leaned in.“You ready?” he asked in a low voice as they walked into the anteroom. His gray eyes flicked to her face, searching for steadiness.Elena breathed and let the breath out slow. “As I’ll ever be,” she said. Her soft brown hair was pulled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, and her hazel eyes were steady despite the sleepless nights. She had learned to fold fear into tasks: speak clearly, provide fact

The penthouse felt smaller when the city outside hissed with rumor. Elena stood at the window, palms flat on the glass, watching the lights fracture into a million impatient stories. Damian moved behind her with the sure, quiet step she’d come to know — the step of a man who measured movement and consequence, who never wasted motion even when his heart wanted to do nothing but race.“You look tired,” he said, and the sentence was more gentle than an observation; it was a plea.She let out a breath that tasted like the coffee she hadn’t had time to drink. “I am.” She turned and met his gray eyes, the ones that could be so cold in boardrooms and so molten in private. “I’m furious. And scared. And exhausted.”He crossed the room and took her hand, the way people take one another before a storm. “We fight,” he said simply. “We show the truth. We do it together.”She leaned into him, because leaning into him had become a refuge in a world that wanted to make them spectacles. “Promise me yo