The Billionaire Who Hid In Sight의 모든 챕터: 챕터 11 - 챕터 20

The first thing Lena noticed was the silence.Not the peaceful kind. The deliberate kind. The sort that settled after something had been moved or removed.Her apartment door stood exactly as she’d left it. No forced entry. No mess. Still, every instinct in her body told her she wasn’t alone anymore. Not in the way she used to be.She locked the door behind her and leaned back against it, breathing through the tightness in her chest.You’re getting close.The message replayed in her head like a low hum.She crossed the room slowly, checking the windows, the hallway, the bathroom. Everything looked normal. Too normal. She exhaled only after she reached her desk and opened her laptop.Three new emails waited in her encrypted inbox.One from a source she’d been cultivating for months.One from an unknown contact.One from Eli.She opened the source’s message first.We need to stop. I can’t do this anymore. They know. Please don’t contact me again.No signature.Her stomach dropped.She st

The city woke up tense.Lena felt it the moment she stepped outside, an unease riding the morning air, sharp and metallic. Traffic moved faster than usual. People spoke louder, laughed quicker, as if noise itself could keep something unnamed at bay.She walked three blocks before realizing Eli had been right.Someone was watching.Not obviously. Not the way amateurs did it. This was presence without pressure a car that appeared twice on different streets, a man who stopped to tie his shoe when she slowed, then vanished when she crossed.She didn’t panic.She cataloged.By the time she reached the café they’d agreed on, she already had timestamps.Eli was inside, seated where he could see the door and the reflection in the glass. He didn’t look up when she entered, but his shoulders shifted, a quiet acknowledgment.“You’re being tailed,” she said as she sat.“Yes,” he replied. “So am I.”That surprised her. “You expected that?”“I hoped,” he said. “It means they’re uncertain.”She frow

The smear piece dropped at dawn.Lena saw it before the messages started, before the calls, before the tightening in her chest had time to turn into anger. A colleague had forwarded the link with no commentary just the article, naked and deliberate.It wasn’t sloppy.That was what made it dangerous.The headline framed her as ideological, not incompetent. The language was polished, measured, almost sympathetic. It praised her “passion,” questioned her “objectivity,” suggested without outright stating that her recent work was influenced by proximity to unnamed financial interests.No accusations.Just doubt.She read it twice, then a third time, jaw set. This wasn’t meant to destroy her. It was meant to tilt her, make editors hesitate, make readers wonder, make every future word she wrote feel slightly suspect.Her phone lit up immediately after.Eli.She didn’t answer.Not because she didn’t want to hear him because she needed to think without anyone else’s gravity pulling at her.She

Morning arrived without permission.Lena woke before her alarm, the city still half-asleep outside her window. Pale light pressed against the curtains like a question she wasn’t ready to answer. For a moment, she lay still, listening to traffic in the distance, to her own breathing, to the quiet after everything that had been said and not said the night before.She replayed it all despite herself. Eli’s voice. His restraint. The way he had stepped close and then stopped, as if the space between them mattered as much as the closeness ever could.She sat up abruptly.No. Not now.Romance whatever this was becoming could not be the loudest thing in her head. Not with pressure tightening, not with the city shifting beneath her feet.She dressed quickly, pulled her hair back, and made coffee she barely tasted. By the time she reached the newsroom, the building was fully awake, buzzing with something sharper than usual.Anticipation.Her inbox was already full.Requests for comment. Invitat

The city didn’t wake up all at once it stretched into awareness, slow and wary, like it knew something had shifted overnight.Lena felt it the moment she stepped outside. The air was heavier, charged with the kind of tension that didn’t announce itself but lingered anyway. People moved with purpose, conversations clipped, eyes flicking too often toward glowing screens. Information was circulating faster than truth again.She tightened her coat and walked.By the time she reached the newsroom, the quiet had turned sharp. Phones rang without pause. Editors leaned too close to desks that weren’t theirs. A producer from another outlet waited near the elevators, pretending not to.Mark caught her just inside the door.“You’re everywhere,” he said, not bothering to lower his voice.“Am I?” she asked calmly.“You’re being referenced without being quoted,” he replied. “That’s new.”“That’s fear,” she said. “It means we’re close.”He studied her face, then sighed. “We need to talk about timing