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Home / Romance / Cruel Love Back in His Hands / Chapter 101 - Chapter 107

All Chapters of Cruel Love Back in His Hands : Chapter 101 - Chapter 107

107 Chapters

Chapter 102

Detective Walsh had two officers positioned in the Caldwell Technologies lobby when they arrived at eight-fifty.Not visible. Walsh had been clear about that — plain clothes, positioned at the coffee station and near the elevators, radios off. Present but not announced. The moment Kristine gave the word, they moved.She and George took the stairs.Nathan's office door was open.He was at his desk. Jacket on. Coffee beside him. He looked like a man who had arrived early and had been waiting and had decided that waiting calmly was the correct performance for this particular morning.He looked up when she came in.He looked at George beside her.Something moved across his face. Not surprise. The opposite of surprise — a kind of arrival, like a man stepping off a long journey and finally recognising the ground under his feet."Close the door," he said.She closed it.She put the folder on his desk.He looked at it. He did not open it."You don't need to look at it," she said. "You know wh

Chapter 103

She spoke first."Close the drawer," she said.Nathan looked at her."Close it," she said. "Whatever is in there — I don't want to see it. Not from you. Not like this." She held his gaze. "If George has something to tell me he will tell me himself. On his own terms. Not as a move in your game."A long moment.Nathan closed the drawer.George let out a breath beside her that he had been holding for thirty seconds.She turned back to Nathan."You want to talk about what you did," she said. "Then let's talk about what you did."He looked at her. The drawer was closed. The card was unplayed. Something in his posture shifted — not deflated, but recalibrated, the way a person recalibrates when one approach fails and they fall back to the one underneath it."I gave you five years," he said. His voice was different now. The sincerity was still there but the composure was starting to cost him something. "After the incident with George. After the photos. After you left Seattle and I thought — t

Chapter 104

It happened in the corridor.Walsh had Nathan by the arm and was steering him toward the elevator. Nathan was compliant. That was the word Kristine kept coming back to afterward — compliant. He was walking with them. He wasn't fighting. His hands were loose at his sides and his head was down and she had thought, for thirty seconds, that this was how it ended. Quietly. A man led out of a building he had worked in for a decade.Then George stepped out of the office behind her.Nathan heard his footstep.He turned.What happened next took less than four seconds.He pulled free of Walsh's grip — not difficult, Walsh had not been holding hard because there had been no reason to — and he crossed the corridor in two steps and hit George with the full weight of his body before George had time to do anything except turn toward the sound.They went into the wall.Walsh shouted. The two officers moved.But Nathan was not the compact, careful man from the boardroom anymore. He was something else.

Chapter 105

Kristine caught up with her at the elevator.Isabelle had her back to the corridor, bag over one shoulder, watching the floor numbers above the doors. Her lawyer was visible through the lobby glass below — a man in a dark coat checking his phone.Kristine stepped beside her.Isabelle didn't turn."You don't have to do this," Isabelle said. "I've already given Walsh everything. There's nothing left for you to stop.""I'm not trying to stop you," Kristine said.Isabelle turned.Her face was different from every version of it Kristine had seen before. Not the polished consultant. Not the cold woman moving through board meetings with a glass in her hand. Not even the careful, frightened version from the café at six in the morning.This was something underneath all of those.The elevator opened. Neither of them moved.It closed.Isabelle looked at her hands."I was hoping you'd stop me," she said. "That first night you called. I had been sitting on my phone for two weeks telling myself to

Chapter 106

Walsh took her statement in a conference room on the twelfth floor with a court recorder present and Isabelle's lawyer beside her.Kristine was not in the room. She waited outside with George, who had refused the paramedic's suggestion that he go to the hospital and had accepted a cup of coffee instead and was sitting with it going cold in his hands the way her coffees always went cold.They could hear nothing through the door.Walsh had told them it would take time. He had said thorough and he had meant it.It took three hours.When Walsh came out his expression was the particular blankness of a detective who had just heard more than he expected and was processing it into procedure before allowing himself a reaction."She's comprehensive," he said. "I'll give her that.""How bad is it?" George said."For Nathan Caldwell? Significant." Walsh looked at his notes. "Financial fraud, conspiracy, harassment, procurement of false testimony, illegal surveillance." He paused. "The surveillanc

Chapter 107

They found her in Portland.Not hiding — that was what the detective told Walsh, who told Kristine by phone that evening. She had been in a studio apartment in the Pearl District under her own name, working at a walk-in clinic two days a week. As if she had simply stepped sideways from her life and was waiting to see what happened next.She did not resist when they came to the door.Walsh said she had asked, the moment she saw the badges, whether George was all right.---The formal interview happened the following morning. Walsh conducted it. Kristine was not present — Walsh had been clear that the integrity of the statement required her absence — but he called her at noon with a summary.Claire had talked for four hours.Everything. The drugging five years ago, which she described with a specific and clinical precision that Walsh said was the most unsettling part of the whole session. The staged photographs. How she had accessed George's office using a code she had obtained by watch

Chapter 108

Richard called a company-wide meeting at nine the following morning.He did not tell anyone in advance what it was about. He stood at the front of the Caldwell Technologies main floor — no podium, no slides, just Richard in his usual jacket looking older than he had three months ago — and he said that Nathan Caldwell had been removed from his position as COO effective immediately, that the company was cooperating fully with an ongoing police investigation, and that anyone with questions should direct them to legal.He said it in under ninety seconds.Then he went back to his office and closed the door.Kristine heard it secondhand from Lucy, who had been in the room. She was at home. Walsh had asked both her and George to stay available for follow-up questions and neither of them had felt like going in.She called Richard at ten.He answered on the first ring."Are you all right?" she said.A long pause."I built this company for thirty years," he said. "I brought Nathan in because Di

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