جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 290

At that moment, Skyla was outside painting. She held her brush in one hand and checked the message with the other.The second she saw that the person in Chris’s arms was Winter, the brush in her hand snapped clean in two.With a sharp crack, part of the handle fell to the ground, faintly streaked with blood.Hearing the noise, the caregiver hurried over. “How did the brush break? Ms. Jasper, are you alright? Oh no, you’re bleeding.”Skyla glanced at the spot in her palm where the broken end of the brush had pierced her skin. A small bead of blood had surfaced.She smiled faintly. “It’s nothing.”She casually pulled out a couple of tissues and wiped the blood away.That evening, Skyla ate only a little before losing her appetite. She set down her utensils and didn’t take another bite, no matter how much the caregiver tried to persuade her.After hesitating for a moment, the caregiver said, “Mr. Xander cares so much about your health. For his sake, at least have a little more.”

There was a trace of reluctance and regret in her bitter smile. She drew in a sharp breath, then clasped Winter’s hand in return.“Winnie.”With the mask gone, a familiar face was revealed.Winter froze.“Aunt Sasha?”She tightened her grip on Sasha’s arm at once, a wave of delayed fear crashing over her.“Aunt Sasha, are you okay? Did you get hurt anywhere?”With one hand still supporting Sasha, Winter slipped the other arm around her back, helped her up from the ground, and brushed the dust from her clothes.Sasha inhaled lightly, then shook her head.“I just banged my knee.”“Let me see.”Winter crouched down and carefully lifted the hem of Sasha’s dress to her knee. Sure enough, the skin around it was already red.Sasha lowered her head and glanced at it.“It’s fine. You were driving slowly, so it wasn’t a hard hit.”“I’m taking you to the hospital to get checked out.”Winter pulled open the passenger door, but Sasha caught her hand.“No, it’s just a little bump. Th

After the news broke that Chris had been placed under official investigation, servers across every major social media platform crashed for nearly ten minutes.The phones in Xander Corporation’s PR department were flooded nonstop. Several major companies with close ties to the Xander Corporation were thrown into panic.Standing under the sun at Eco Park, Winter listened to the people around her talking about it, her expression calm.She turned and glanced at the phone in someone’s hand.Below the article was a photo of Chris being led toward a police car.Wearing a sharp black suit, Chris stood in front of the police car parked outside the corporation headquarters.His expression was cool and unreadable, completely calm. He didn’t look like a man about to be taken in for questioning.If anything, he looked like he was on his way to a high-level business summit, as though he were the most important person there.“I seriously can’t believe Chris Xander turned out to be this kind o

Winter stared groggily at the line of text on her phone screen. It took her two seconds to process it before she was fully awake.Roy was downstairs?She threw off the covers, sat up, and got out of bed. Then she hurried to the window, pulled back the curtain, and looked down.At that hour, the lights around the apartment complex had already dimmed automatically for the night. They were faint now. A light rain had fallen earlier that evening, and a thin mist still clung to the landscaping below.She lived on the nineteenth floor, so she couldn’t make out everything clearly. Even so, she recognized Roy’s black SUV at a glance, parked right outside her building.It was already eleven o’clock. If it had been anyone else, she never would have gone downstairs. She would have worried about running into trouble. But this was Roy. She wasn’t worried at all.With Roy there, she felt completely safe.She pulled on her robe, slipped into her shoes, and hurried downstairs.At that hour, th

In the warm car, Winter still felt a faint chill creeping in from nowhere. She tightened both hands around the cup of hot milk.“Let’s not talk about him anymore.” She turned slightly to look at Roy. His hands were still on the steering wheel, his eyes lowered, as if he had drifted off in thought. She gave an awkward little smile. “I’m boring you, aren’t I?”But the truth was, she felt like he was the only person she could say these things to.Roy seemed to come back to himself and turned to look at her. Something flashed through his dark brown eyes, so quickly she couldn’t catch it before it vanished.For a split second, the intensity of it startled her.Then he looked away again. His fingertips had gone cold as they moved across the screen.“Your judgment is probably not wrong. A lifetime is a long time...”Before he could finish typing, Winter suddenly pressed a hand over the back of his gloved one and looked at him suspiciously.“The birthmark on your eyelid...”Roy’s grip