บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Vengeful Heiress: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

The centrepiece pendant was giving me trouble.Not in the way that meant something was fundamentally wrong with it. More the way a piece sometimes resisted you right at the end, when you were close enough to see exactly what it wanted to be but your hands hadn't quite caught up yet. I had been sitting with it for the better part of the afternoon, turning it slowly under the lamp, nudging the centre stone setting by degrees so small they were almost imaginary.The workshop was quiet around me. That particular afternoon quiet I valued more than most people understood. No meetings. No performances. No version of myself I had to hold carefully in place. Just the work, the light, and the sound of the city moving far below the windows.I was reaching for a different tool when I heard footsteps in the corridor.Two sets. One I recognised immediately as Sophia's, quick and decisive, the walk of a woman who always had somewhere to be. The other was softer. More deliberate. Like someone carryin

I spent the rest of the morning at Eternal Jewelry, sitting across from Ray with every document spread between us on the table. We went through the full architecture of the fabrication piece by piece, and when we reached the gap it was exactly as he had described. A twelve-day stretch, papered over cleanly but never fully sealed."It held against Harper's investigation." I kept my eyes on the folder."Harper was looking for whether the identity was real." Ray closed the folder with a quiet, deliberate snap. "Nathan is looking at whether the timeline holds. That is a different angle entirely. We patch this before he pulls any further."We went through what needed to happen. The new documentation. The contacts Ray would use. How it would be cross-referenced so that nothing raised more questions than it answered.By the time I left, the afternoon had gone grey and my head felt heavy with it all. I drove to Anthony's building without quite deciding to.He opened the door looking like a ma

Robert’s PovLeo and Lydia stood at the edge of our table.Impeccably dressed, both of them, wearing the easy confidence of people who had timed their arrival to the minute and were quietly pleased about it. Leo's eyes swept between Anthony and me before landing, deliberately, on Anthony's hand near mine on the table. His smile did not shift. "What a coincidence." Leo's voice carried just enough pleasure to sharpen the word at both ends. "The best table in Lumiere. We all seem to have very similar taste.""We were actually in the middle of something," Anthony said. Perfectly level. Completely immovable.Leo's gaze dropped to my left hand. Something moved through his jaw. A quick, involuntary tightening, there and gone before his smile could reassemble over it. His eyes found Anthony's and held them for one beat longer than necessary."I am sure you were," Leo said smoothly, already pulling out the chair beside him. " I’m sure you don’t mind us joining you at this table as well”Antho

Roberta’s PovThe house was settled and dark when I got back.My parents had gone to bed. The corridor outside my room was quiet, the kind of quiet that only arrived late at night when the whole house had finally exhaled. I changed out of my dress, took my hair down, and sat on the edge of the bed in the still of the room.The folded paper was on the bedside table where I had left it this morning.I picked it up. I had no plan to. My hand just reached for it the way it had been reaching for it every time I walked back into this room, like something unfinished that kept asking to be looked at.Four sets of initials in a clean printed column. I read through them slowly, the way I always did. The first three moved through me without catching on anything solid. The fourth one made me stop.It still did that. Every time. Something about it sat at the very edge of recognition, neither familiar nor strange, just present in that persistent, slightly unsettling way of things your mind knows it

Leo— (Third Person)Leo sat at his hotel suite desk on a Tuesday morning with a cup of coffee going cold beside him and a list of suppliers on his screen. He had spent three evenings on this. Cross-referencing. Researching. Reading every interview Roberta Alfred had ever given about her craft, her materials, her process. The kind of research most people only did for business. Leo did it for something else entirely.He found what he needed by Wednesday.The delivery arrived at Eternal Jewelry’s atelier on Thursday morning. Rare design materials. Sourced with a precision that could not have been accidental. The kind of stock that was difficult to find on short notice and nearly impossible to find at the correct grade. He had found both.The note tucked inside was four lines. Nothing flowery. Nothing that could be called romantic by any reasonable measure.‘For the rebuild. From someone who understands what it means to lose work.’He sealed it. Sent it. And went about the rest of his da