Todos los capítulos de Rejected, Now He Craves For Me: Capítulo 81 - Capítulo 90

Julien's POVDamien stopped near the door, and for a moment I thought he'd simply leave, the way he'd left the boardroom weeks earlier, quiet and defeated. Instead, he turned back, something desperate and ugly finally breaking through whatever composure he'd managed to hold onto through everything else."You want to know the truth?" he said, his voice rising now, carrying across the room, cameras immediately swinging back toward him. "None of this would have happened if she hadn't used exactly what she has to climb this high in the first place. A pretty face, a sympathetic story, the right men convinced to hand her whatever she wanted. That's not resilience. That's exploitation, dressed up as a fairy tale for people too eager to believe it."The room went utterly still.I felt something cold and immediate rise in my chest, an instinct to step forward, to defend her the way I had moments earlier, loud and public and certain. But before I could move, Isabella was already walking toward

Julien's POVHartford's stock recovered within three weeks of the shareholders' meeting, climbing back past its previous high once the full scope of Damien's fabrication became public and investors understood exactly what Isabella had actually survived. It wasn't simply recovery. It was validation, the market finally, thoroughly convinced of something the past year had made increasingly obvious to everyone paying close attention.Isabella Hartford didn't break under pressure. She'd survived Margaret's cruelty, Sterling's patience, Damien's calculated manipulation, three separate, sophisticated attempts to dismantle everything she'd built, and each time, she'd emerged not just intact, but demonstrably stronger, the company's foundation reinforced through every crisis rather than weakened by it.I watched the transformation in how the industry spoke about her now, the tone shifting from cautious admiration into something closer to genuine respect. She wasn't simply the heiress who'd sur

Isabella's POVEthan Blackwood requested the meeting through formal channels, no unexpected appearance at a gala, no carefully engineered introduction designed to catch me off guard. Just a straightforward email from his office, requesting thirty minutes to discuss a potential partnership opportunity in Hartford's international expansion.I'd heard his name before, of course. Everyone in the industry had. He'd built a reputation over the past decade for taking struggling companies and transforming them into genuine global powerhouses, always through careful, methodical strategy rather than flash or spectacle. No scandals attached to his name. No history of hostile takeovers or manufactured crises. Simply a spotless record of competence, consistent enough that his reputation had become almost its own form of currency in the industry.I agreed to the meeting, curious despite myself, though I approached it with considerably more caution than I might have a year earlier, before Margaret,

Isabella's POVThe Ashford Group merger fell through three days before signing, and I learned about it not through formal notice, but through a brief phone call from Ethan himself, his voice carrying something more personal than the careful professionalism I'd grown accustomed to across our months of partnership."I'm withdrawing Hartford's endorsement of the Ashford acquisition," he said."That merger's been in development for four months," I said, surprised. "It's worth nearly a billion dollars in projected value.""I understand what it's worth," he said. "I also understand who partially financed Ashford Group's founding capital, three years ago, before either of us had any reason to notice."I felt something shift, listening to the careful weight in his voice. "Who?""Margaret Hamilton," he said simply. "One of several silent investors who quietly backed Ashford's early expansion. I don't have proof she still holds influence there directly, but I'm not comfortable exposing Hartford

Isabella's POVThe first sign came through a routine internal audit, small enough that I nearly dismissed it entirely. Naomi flagged an unusual pattern in our quarterly filings, a set of transactions that didn't align cleanly with what our finance team had actually recorded."It's minor," she said, sliding the report across my desk. "Probably a clerical error somewhere in the reconciliation."It wasn't minor. Within a week, three additional discrepancies surfaced, each one slightly larger than the last, each one traced eventually back to internal employees who'd apparently been quietly compensated for feeding manipulated data into our reporting systems."Someone's inside," Creed said, once his team completed their initial investigation. "Not a single source. At least four employees across two different departments, all receiving payments from the same external account.""Whose account?" I asked, though something in me already anticipated the answer wouldn't be simple."Veridian Global