All Chapters of Rejected, Now He Craves For Me: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Julien's POVI noticed it on a Tuesday, buried in a stack of reports I wasn't even supposed to see.Naomi had accidentally left a folder on the printer near my desk, the kind of mistake that happens when someone's carrying too much at once. I picked it up to bring it to her, and that's when the numbers caught my eye. Quarterly projections for the Caldwell account, the same account I'd spent weeks reconciling by hand.The totals didn't match.Not by much. A few hundred thousand here, a discrepancy in the shipping margins there. Small enough that most people skimming the report would never notice. But I'd spent three months buried in these exact numbers, invoice by invoice, and I knew them the way I used to know boardroom faces. These weren't my numbers."Naomi," I said, catching her in the hallway before she reached the elevator. "This report on the Caldwell account. Where did it come from?"She glanced at the folder, frowning slightly. "That should have come from finance. Why?""The n

Julien's POVIt took me four more days to find the last piece I needed.The trail led to a board member named Richard Voss, a quiet man in his sixties who rarely spoke up in meetings, the kind of person everyone forgets to watch closely because he never gives them a reason to. I found the connection almost by accident, cross-referencing a shell consulting firm listed as "corporate advisory" on the adjusted Caldwell reports against Voss's public financial disclosures.The consulting firm didn't exist. Not really. It was a shell registered under my mother's estate lawyer, funneling payments to Voss for "advisory services" that matched, almost to the dollar, the timing of every discrepancy I'd traced through the reports.I sat with that information for an entire evening before I let myself accept what it meant. My mother hadn't just planted doubt through gossip and boardroom threats. She'd paid a Hartford board member directly to falsify numbers and leak them to the press. That wasn't in

Isabella's POVI found the pattern at two in the morning, surrounded by three years of internal reports spread across my dining table, coffee gone cold beside me.It started small. A line item in a projections report from March, nearly identical in phrasing to a quote Margaret had given an industry newsletter two weeks later. I almost dismissed it as coincidence, until I found a second one. Then a third. Internal numbers, specific enough that no outsider should have had access to them, showing up almost verbatim in conversations Margaret had been having with select investors over the past four months.I pulled the distribution list for each of those reports and cross-referenced it against board attendance records, against calendar requests, against anything I could find. Three names kept appearing in places they shouldn't have. Harold Whitfield. Simon Reyes. Thomas Bell. Men my father had brought onto the board fifteen years ago, men who'd known me since I was a girl visiting his offi

Isabella's POVBy Thursday, the story had grown teeth of its own.It started as one planted article about mismanaged funds. By the end of the week, three different outlets ran "insider" interviews, anonymous sources claiming I'd forced the merger through coercion, that Julien had signed away his shares under pressure, that I'd built my empire on manipulation rather than merit. One headline called me "The Woman Who Took Everything." Another asked, in bold letters across a business section, whether Hartford Enterprises could survive under leadership this "aggressive."I sat in my office reading each one, feeling something colder settle into my stomach with every paragraph. This wasn't just business sabotage anymore. No one questioned whether a man had the right to run a company after a hostile takeover. They called it strategy, ambition, good business. When I did it, they called it manipulation. Vindictiveness. A woman who'd clawed her way to power and couldn't be trusted with it.That

Julien's POVCreed Hartford found me on the third floor, waiting outside my office like he'd been standing there long enough to memorize the hallway.I recognized him immediately, though we'd only met twice before, both times briefly, at functions where Isabella kept careful distance between us. He had her same quiet composure, the kind that made a room adjust around him without him needing to raise his voice."Mr. Hamilton," he said. "Do you have a few minutes?""Julien's fine," I said, unlocking my office door. "Come in."He stepped inside, closing the door behind him with a deliberateness that told me this wasn't a casual visit. "I'm building a case," he said, without preamble. "Against your mother. Falsified reports, the bribed board members, the shell companies funding the smear campaign against Isabella. I have most of it already, thanks to what you handed over regarding Reyes.""I assumed as much," I said. "What do you need from me?""Internal structure," he said. "Hamilton Gro