All Chapters of Dear Ex Mate, You're Mine to Ruin: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Dorian’s POVI stood there looking at the Hendersons and genuinely could not make sense of what I was seeing. Of all the people I had expected to fold under the pressure building around Fangshade, these two were not on that list. And yet here they were, sitting across from me with packed expressions and apologies ready on their lips, telling me they were pulling out.“Why now?” I asked, keeping my voice measured even though frustration was climbing steadily up the back of my neck. “What changed between our last conversation and today?”Mr. Henderson shifted in his seat. “It’s not a decision we came to lightly, Alpha Dorian. You have to understand that.”“Then help me understand it,” I said. “Because from where I’m sitting, this doesn’t make sense. Walk me through it.”Mrs. Henderson was the one who answered, and she chose her words carefully, like someone who had rehearsed this part and was still finding it difficult. “We received word. A very clear and direct message that if we cont

Lillian’s POVFor a full second neither of us moved. I stood there in the wardrobe with clothes hanging around my shoulders and Miranda stood with her hand still gripping the door she had just flung open, and we stared at each other in a silence that felt like the moment before something breaks.Then Miranda’s face went from shock to something that was closer to pure fury than anything I had seen from her yet, and she stepped forward with her whole body coiled tight like she was going to come at me right there in the closet.“Get out,” she said, her voice low and shaking with it. “Get out of my room right now.” She grabbed my arm and pulled, not a gentle suggestion but a hard yank, and I stumbled forward out of the wardrobe and into the room. Her hands immediately went to my arms, my pockets, patting down the sides of my clothes with rough searching movements. “What did you take? What did you touch? Give it back right now.”I shoved her back hard with both hands flat against her shou

Dorian’s POVThe room felt different after she left. Not quieter exactly, because silence had its own quality and this was not peaceful silence. It was the kind that pressed against the walls and sat heavy on every surface, the kind that only exists because something that should have been said wasn’t, or because something that was said landed in a way that couldn’t be taken back.I stood there for a while without moving. Then the stillness curdled into something else, something hotter and less patient, and I moved to the window, stood looking out at the dark grounds below because I needed somewhere to put my eyes that wasn’t the empty doorway she had walked through.The anger came first, the way it always did, quick and defensive and looking for somewhere to land. But it had nowhere to go this time because underneath it, sitting solid and immovable, was the knowledge that she was not wrong. Not about any of it. The people in this house had made her feel unwelcome from the beginning a

Lillian’s POVI was up earlier than usual that morning, dressed and ready before the house had fully come alive around me. After everything that had happened the night before, sitting still was not something my body was willing to do. I needed to move, needed to do something that felt productive, needed to put my hands on a problem I actually had some ability to solve.The company was where I was going. The Hendersons pulling out was not something I could afford to sit back and accept without at least making the effort to change their minds directly.I found Dorian in the hallway near the main entrance, jacket on, keys in hand, clearly also heading out. I fell into step beside him naturally, the way we used to move through mornings together before everything fractured, and asked him if he was heading straight to the office.He didn’t answer immediately, which was already an answer of its own kind.“I have somewhere to be first,” he said.I looked at him. “Where?”“I’ll be at the compa

Dorian’s POVMy first instinct was to follow her. I was already halfway to the door before something stopped me, some quieter and more considered part of my thinking that recognized the particular quality of what I had just watched move across her face. That was not a woman who needed someone coming after her right now. That was a woman who needed four walls and silence and the space to absorb something that had hit her harder than almost anything else could have.I let her go.Instead I walked back to my own office and stood at the window for a few minutes, looking out at the city below without really seeing it, and then I picked up my phone and called my assistant.“I need an emergency board meeting,” I said. “Today. Get everyone in as fast as you can manage.”It took the better part of three hours to pull them all together, between schedules and locations and the general resistance that always accompanied requests that arrived without advance notice. But by mid afternoon they wer