Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Billionaire’s Discarded Bride : Kabanata 101 - Kabanata 110

Bella POVBy day three, my dining table had disappeared under a war zone. Transaction records, call logs, SEC filings, and corporate registry documents from four different jurisdictions covered every inch of the surface, organized into stacks that Caleb and I had developed a silent shorthand for over the past seventy-two hours. His pile on the left, mine on the right, and the middle stack that belonged to both of us, worked through together every evening after Tom went to bed.It had started practically enough. Caleb would arrive at seven, after Tom's dinner but before his bath, staying long enough to read him a story before we settled at the table with our laptops and got to work. Maya had stopped commenting on it after the first night, and now simply delivered coffee at intervals without being asked."Here." Caleb slid a folder across to me at eleven on the third night, not looking up from his laptop. "Victoria's calendar access. Everything she could have seen in the months before t

Bella POVMargaret looked between us, her gift bag hanging limp from her fingers now, and for the first time she looked less like a woman making a social call and more like what she actually was — a woman who had bet on the wrong daughter and was only now beginning to understand the full cost of it.She left without another word, her heels clicking against the pavement, her spine perfectly straight all the way to her car, because Margaret Hart would not give anyone the satisfaction of watching her crumble in a daycare parking lot.I watched until the car disappeared, and then I exhaled slowly, my hands steady through the force of long practice."Are you okay?" Caleb asked, from beside me."I'm fine." I turned toward the entrance. "Let's get Tom."He fell into step beside me, and I was grateful he didn't push it further, didn't try to make it a moment or extract something from me while I was still raw at the edges.Inside, Tom came barreling down the hallway the moment he saw us, dinos

Bella pov I bought things, the owner put them in brown paper bags tied with string, and when we walked out into the evening air the street was lit in amber.********The restaurant was small — twelve tables, handwritten menus, a wine list on a chalkboard. We sat by the window and Caleb ordered without looking at the menu, and when I raised an eyebrow he said, "I called ahead. I asked what was good and memorized it. Don't make it strange.""I'm not making it strange.""You're doing the eyebrow thing.""That's just my face."He looked at me across the table, and the candlelight did something unfair to the angles of his face, and I looked down at my menu. "Tell me something I don't know about you," he said."That's a broad category.""Pick something."I thought about it. "I almost took a job in Tokyo," I said finally. "A year into Hart Worldwide. A firm there offered me a partnership that would have tripled our revenue in eighteen months. I said no.""Why?""Because Tom had just started

Bella POVThe message came through my business contact line, which was why I almost didn't question it.Re: Singapore acquisition — potential whistleblower with documentation on Richard Hart's shell company activity. Can only meet in person. Time sensitive. Tonight, 8 PM, 14 Crane Yard (warehouse district).The attached name was someone I'd heard of — a mid-level compliance officer who had worked briefly at one of Richard's firms before the collapse. I called the number. It went to voicemail, a professional enough greeting to pass a cursory check. I told myself the location was odd but whistleblowers were paranoid by nature, and warehouse districts at eight in the evening weren't inherently alarming if you were the kind of woman who moved through the world with the baseline confidence that you could handle most situations.I almost texted Caleb. My thumb hovered over his name twice. But Tom was at Maya's, the restructuring reports needed to go out by morning, and I told myself it was

Bella POVThe courtroom was smaller than I expected. I'd testified in arbitration rooms before — but this was a criminal preliminary hearing, wood-paneled and fluorescent-lit, with a court reporter in the corner and a prosecutor who looked like she hadn't slept since days. I sat in the witness box and answered the questions precisely, the way I answered everything, and I didn't look at Victoria.Not because I was afraid to. Because I'd decided she didn't deserve the directness of my gaze.The evidence was comprehensive. Caleb's security team had documented everything — the burner phone chain, the IP trail, the two men's statements once they understood the scope of what they were facing, the crane yard warehouse's security footage from a neighboring building that had caught the ambush setup beginning hours before I arrived. The compliance officer's name had been pulled from a forum thread Victoria had accessed from her Geneva apartment, a detail so sloppy it would have embarrassed he