All Chapters of The lost Morrison Heiress: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Lena's POV Jade was still beside me, waiting. The lobby noise continued around us, team wrapping up, cameras being packed, Henry talking to someone from the press office with the warm attentive expression he brought to every conversation, Claire moving between people with the quiet efficiency that was simply how she occupied any professional space. All of it carried on exactly as it had been thirty seconds ago. Everything felt slightly different to me now. "Where is he?" I asked. "Main entrance," Jade said. "Security has him contained." A brief pause, the pause she used when she was choosing words carefully, the Jade pause that meant the next thing required delicacy. "He's vocal." "How vocal?" "Significantly," she said. "He's been asking to speak to whoever cancelled his contracts. He's been asking this repeatedly and at increasing volume for approximately twenty minutes. Security has kept him at the entrance but he's showing no signs of leaving voluntarily." "Is he alone?" "Y

Lena's POV I found out the way everyone finds out about everything now. My phone. I'd been awake for four minutes, still horizontal, still in that half-conscious state where the previous day hasn't fully reassembled itself yet, when the notifications started. Not one or two. A cascade. The sound of them running together like rain on a window, each one arriving before the previous one had finished registering, until I turned the volume off and lay there staring at the screen with the particular stillness of someone who understands that something has happened and is giving themselves one more moment before they find out what. Forty-seven notifications in four minutes. I sat up. The headline that had broken first, sometime around midnight, according to the timestamp, while I had been lying in the dark not sleeping and staring at Aiden's message on my phone, was from a business publication I respected. One that did not typically run personal stories. One that prided itself on keeping

Lena's POV Marcus arrived on a Wednesday. I knew because Jade mentioned it when she ran through my schedule that morning, the same way she mentioned everything, efficiently and without editorializing, in the particular professional tone that communicated information without attaching weight to it. "Ten o'clock, Morrison Corp quarterly review. Eleven-thirty, call the Seoul office. Two p.m., Mr. Grey will be joining the afternoon strategy session." Mr. Grey will be joining. I wrote it down in my notebook the way I wrote everything down and moved on to the next item on the schedule and was very professional about it for the rest of the morning. The strategy session was about Morrison Corporation's expansion into the Southeast Asian market. Three months of groundwork had gone into the proposal on the table, real estate acquisition, hospitality partnerships, a phased entry strategy that Damien had been developing with the senior team since before I arrived. It was detailed and well

Lena's POV Abel came to find me on a Friday morning with a folder and no particular expression on his face. This was how I'd learned to tell when something was serious. When Abel had something entertaining to deliver he arrived with energy, the forward momentum of a man who enjoyed having information and enjoyed giving it even more. When he had something that required care he arrived neutral. Face clear. Folder closed. Waiting to see how I'd receive it before deciding how to give it. I closed my laptop. "Sit down," I said. He sat. He opened the folder. Aiden had hired a private investigator three weeks ago. The PI's name was Carl Reeves. Mid-level, competent, the kind of professional who specialized in corporate and personal surveillance and had built a steady practice doing it for people who needed information gathered quietly and efficiently. Abel had identified him inside forty-eight hours of his engagement with Aiden, which told me something about how closely Abel was wa

Lena's POV I was getting dressed running late for an eight o'clock with Mr. Osei, who had survived my promotion to CEO without adjusting his schedule or his expectations by a single degree and showed no signs of beginning to do so, and I reached for the jacket I'd worn to last week's board briefing and it didn't close. It wouldn't close. Couldn't. The fabric pulled across the front with a quiet finality that said: not anymore. Not this one. Not today. I stood in front of the mirror. The bump was small. It had been there for a while if I was honest about it, I'd noticed it privately, touched it in the bath, registered it in the mornings before I put clothes on. But I'd been dressing around it. Choosing cuts that accommodated it without announcing it. Not quite hiding it but not quite presenting it either, occupying the space between those two things where I'd been living since the pregnancy became undeniable and I hadn't yet decided what to do about the undeniability. The jacket