All Chapters of The CEO's Undercover Heiress : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Isabella's POV The city smelled of wet iron, exhaust, and the salt-tang of the approaching storm.I was standing on a gravel-strewn rooftop in Long Island City, three miles from the Sterling Tower. I was wearing a black windbreaker and heavy jeans I’d lifted from a maintenance locker during my crawl through the HVAC system. My hair was tucked under a dark beanie, my face obscured by the grime of the tunnels. To the world, I was a ghost. To the sensors, I was invisible.I pulled a new phone from my pocket—not a burner, but a custom-built, hardware-encrypted device I had stashed in the bakery cellar weeks ago as a contingency. I tapped a single icon on the screen."Aethelgard," a voice answered on the first ring."Report," I said. My voice felt raspier than usual, raw from the dust of the ventilation shafts."The buyback is complete," said the woman on the other end. She was a former Vane compliance officer, a woman Arthur had fired and forgotten, and someone I had spent months quietly

The fog on the East River was thick enough to swallow a fleet. I stood on the deck of the Aethelgard, a refurbished research vessel that served as a mobile, offshore server farm. The air smelled of salt and the metallic tang of high-powered cooling fans. Somewhere behind the grey curtain of the morning, the Sterling Tower was vibrating itself to death, but here, the only sound was the slap of dark water against the hull.​My phone buzzed on the railing. It wasn't a call. It was a formal service of process, delivered digitally via an encrypted Sterling Tech portal.​PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION AND COMPLIANCE ORDER: MATTER OF VANE-STERLING.​I swiped through the pages. The board wasn't just coming for my shares; they were coming for my existence. The document, signed by Sterling’s lead counsel and rubber-stamped by a friendly judge in a closed-door session, labeled me a "Non-Human Biological Liability."​It was a masterclass in institutional gaslighting. They weren't claiming I was a person

The monitor on the bridge of the Aethelgard flickered with the ghost of the boardroom feed before the signal died. I sat in the high-backed pilot’s chair, the hum of the ship’s servers beneath my boots feeling like a low-grade fever. The final frame was burned into my retinas: Liam, standing at the head of that mahogany table, looking into the lens as if he could see through the encryption, through the miles of water and fog, and straight into my marrow.​I abstain.​Two words. They weren't a "Yes," which would have been the final strike of the gavel on my coffin. But they weren't a "No," which would have been the shield I thought he’d hold until his arms broke. An abstention was a calculated retreat. It was the move of a man who valued the board's rules over the wife's humanity.​"The vote is recorded," the man in the grey coat said from the doorway. He didn't move closer. He knew the temperature in the room had just dropped to absolute zero. "He didn't hand you over, Isabella. He ne

​The bunker hummed. It was a digital purr, the sound of a billion dollars’ worth of cooling fans and high-end processors, but to me, it sounded like a funeral dirge. I stood in the center of Marcus Thorne’s command center, my eyes fixed on the panoramic wall of monitors. The transition from the fog of the East River to the pressurized stillness of this underground fortress had been too fast.​The screens were a sea of red.​BREAKING: ISABELLA VANE DECLARED ROGUE ASSET.STERLING-VANE HEIRESS ACCUSED OF SYSTEMIC CORPORATE ESPIONAGE.SOURCES: VANE-STERLING ALLIANCE DISSOLVED FOLLOWING BOARD BETRAYAL.​The headlines weren't just reporting the news; they were sculpting a monster. I watched the scroll, my face reflected in the dark glass of a dormant terminal. I looked pale. Sharp. Like a piece of flint. The media narrative had pivoted with surgical precision within minutes of my signature on the Horizon contract. I wasn't the victim of a corporate struggle anymore. I was the architect of m

The bunker was cold, but the servers were sweating. I could feel the heat radiating from the racks—a digital fever. On the primary monitor, the progress bar for the Medusa purge crawled forward with agonizing deliberation.​Deletion in progress: 14%.​I sat in the glow of the blue light, my hands resting flat on the console. My skin looked translucent, the veins a map of something the Sterling board had called "synthetic." I didn't feel synthetic. I felt exhausted. I felt like an old clock whose mainspring had been wound too tight, waiting for the inevitable snap.​"Isabella."​Marcus Thorne’s voice was a low rasp from the periphery. He was standing by the communication hub, a tablet in his hand. The red emergency strobes of the bunker painted his face in rhythmic intervals of shadow and blood.​"The perimeter is holding, but the digital wall is leaking," Thorne said. "He’s trying to bridge the connection."​I didn't need to ask who he was. My terminal chirped—a high-pitched, insisten