All Chapters of The CEO's Undercover Heiress : Chapter 81 - Chapter 84

POV: LiamThe facility didn't just feel empty; it felt hollowed out. The silence left behind by the Julian Vane AI was a heavy, physical thing, a void where a god had once lived. Arthur Vance was already moving, his fingers dancing across a handheld terminal as he scrambled the local perimeter sensors."The Pension Board's contractors are landing at the geothermal plant four miles East," Arthur said, his voice clipped. "They aren't here for a deposition. They’ve been authorized to use 'extraordinary measures' to recover the Sterling lifeboat fund. To them, you aren't people—you’re the human passwords to three billion dollars."I looked at Isabella. She was standing by the window, her silhouette sharp against the moonlight. She looked different. The slight, constant tension in her shoulders had vanished. She was breathing with her whole body, her chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm that made my own heart ache with a strange, fierce relief."The routing codes," she said, tur

POV: IsabellaThe Oregon coast has a way of stripping a person down to their essentials. There is no marble here to reflect a curated image, no velvet to soften the edges of a hard day. There is only the salt, the cedar, and the relentless rhythm of the tide.I sat at the small, scarred wooden desk in the corner of our bedroom, watching the rain streak the glass. It was a different kind of rain than the ones in Manhattan—it didn’t feel like an omen of a corporate takeover. It just felt like a Tuesday.Before me lay a simple, leather-bound journal. It wasn't a tablet. It didn't have a login, a biometric scanner, or an encryption layer. It was just paper and ink. I picked up the pen and felt the weight of it in my hand.August 14th, I wrote. I forgot where I put my keys today. It took me twenty minutes to find them under a pile of mail. It was the most frustrating, wonderful feeling I’ve had all week.A year ago, forgetting was impossible. My mind had been a search engine, a perfect, cl