Lahat ng Kabanata ng IN LOVE WITH HIS ENEMY: Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

Eliza's POVAdam made it in seventeen minutes.I knew because I counted. The viewing room had no windows, no clock, nothing but buzzing fluorescents and the weight of what I'd just read. So I counted. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three. The rhythm kept me from thinking. From feeling. From opening the box again and reading the letter until the words dissolved.When the door finally opened, he was slightly out of breath. He'd run from the car. Adam Thorne, who never ran, who moved through the world like he had all the time in it, had run.His eyes found me first. Then the box. Then Chloe, leaning against the wall, watching us both with an expression I couldn't read."You okay?" he asked."No."He crossed the room in four strides. Didn't touch me—he never assumed—but stood close enough that I could feel his heat, his presence, the solid fact of him.Chloe pushed off the wall. "I delivered. Now I need what I wa

Eliza's POVI found him at the penthouse.I don't know what I expected—maybe that he'd be gone, fled, vanished into whatever hole men like him disappear into when the walls close in. But the doorman waved me through with a look I couldn't read, and the elevator carried me up to the home I'd left ten days ago, and the door was unlocked.He was sitting on the floor.Back against the couch. Empty glass in his hand. The same couch where I'd found him with Chloe, though someone had cleaned it since. Erased the evidence. Not the memory.He looked up when I walked in. Didn't stand. Didn't speak.I closed the door behind me."Eliza." His voice was rough. "You shouldn't be here.""No. I shouldn't."I crossed the room. Sat in the chair across from him. Not close. Close enough.He watched me with red-rimmed eyes. He'd lost weight—I could see it in his collarbones, the way his shirt hung loose. The ma

Eliza's POVThree weeks passed in a blur of paper and silence.I stopped counting days. Stopped watching news. Stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instead, I worked. Morning to night, night to morning, filling every hour with something that needed to be done. Sterling Global had been adrift since Scott's arrest—board members resigning, contracts freezing, the whole machine threatening to stall. I became its engine.Meetings with lawyers. Calls with clients. Reviews of divisions I hadn't thought about in years. I learned the business my father built from the inside out, not as a figurehead or a wife, but as its leader. The board had voted unanimously to install me as interim CEO. No one objected. No one dared.Adam was there. Always there. But he gave me space—the kind of space that meant he was present without pressing, available without demanding. He'd appear with coffee at exactly the right moment, then disappear when I needed to focus.

Chloe's POV — The Night BeforeThe hotel room was beige.Beige walls. Beige carpet. Beige bedspread that had been washed a thousand times and still looked dirty. I'd been in rooms like this my whole life—cheap, temporary, places you passed through on the way to somewhere else. But this time, there was no somewhere else. This was the end of the line.I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the window. Black glass. City lights beyond. Los Angeles, the city of angels, where I'd spent fifteen years trying to become someone who mattered.I'd almost made it. Married money. Manipulated power. Seduced my way into rooms I had no business entering. And now I was here, in a state-funded hotel, waiting to testify against the man I'd helped destroy.The irony wasn't lost on me.My phone buzzed. Singh, checking in. I didn't respond.My mother's face rose in my memory—blurry around the edges, the way old photos get. She'd been beaut

Adam's POVThe name echoed in my skull like a curse.The Collective.I'd spent three days buried in research, chasing shadows through databases that didn't exist, following trails that went cold the moment they got warm. Eliza slept beside me at night—when she slept at all—but I couldn't. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that list. Those ten names. The faces of people who'd decided my woman's father needed to die.Now, finally, I had something.I found them in the spaces between public records. The shell companies that owned shell companies. The donations routed through untraceable channels. The board memberships that overlapped in patterns too consistent to be coincidence. On paper, these people had nothing to do with each other. In reality, they'd been building something together for decades.The Collective wasn't a organization with a headquarters and a newsletter. It was a web. Invisible until you knew how to look.