All Chapters of The Billionaire's Binding Proposal: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Chapter 92~ Kesley ~The entire department was already there when I arrived, clustered near the chartered bus with their bags and coffee cups. Five pairs of eyes turned toward me as I jogged up, slightly out of breath, hair already threatening to escape its ponytail.Dante's expression was caught between amusement and the mild exasperation of a supervisor whose newest employee had just confirmed a stereotype he'd been trying to resist."Bellamy," he said, checking his watch with theatrical precision. "I thought you'd be the most excited about this. First workshop, new team, new experience. I expected you to be first here." He tilted his head. "It turns out women have a very different drive from men.""I prefer to make an entrance," I said, which made Marcus snort into his coffee.Derek looked like he had a comment ready but thought better of it under Dante's watch.We loaded onto the bus—me last, naturally, taking the remaining seat near the middle while the others redistributed them

Chapter 94~ Niklaus ~I didn't sleep.Not even for an hour. Not even the brief, fitful unconsciousness that sometimes passed for rest when the mind refused to shut down.I'd spent the entire night lying on top of the covers in my bedroom at the mansion, fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, while my brain systematically reassembled the last three weeks of my life with this new information.Aria was Kesley.Kesley was Aria.The woman who'd called me a meerkat and the woman whose code I'd read twice because it was that good — same person.The woman who'd sabotaged a date for a thousand dollars each and the woman I'd personally hired — same person.The woman who'd kissed me in a penthouse suite and the woman who couldn't make eye contact during her interview—same person.Every interaction. Every conversation. Every moment where I'd looked at one of them and felt something—attraction, irritation, intrigue, frustration—it had all been her.She'd been playing two roles. Simultaneously. In

Chapter 96~ Kesley ~I made it to my room and closed the door behind me with my back pressed against it like I was barricading against something.Maybe I was.The hallway had felt too open, too exposed — all those wide windows and the smell of pine and fresh mountain air that had no business being cheerful right now. I had walked at a perfectly reasonable pace.My phone was in my hand.I read the message again.Meerkat: Meet me at 12. We need to talk. It's important.12 PM.He wanted to meet Aria at 12 PM.Which was the exact same time Dante had told us to assemble in the lobby.Which meant Niklaus Specter—who was standing approximately forty meters away from me in the morning sunshine smiling that wide, strange smile—had simultaneously joined our workshop AND sent a meeting request to the woman he thought was a separate person entirely.I stared at the message until the words stopped making grammatical sense, the way words do when you read them too many times. The potential to deton

Chapter 98~ Kesley ~I couldn't unpack.I'd tried. Had opened my bag, stared at its contents, closed it again. Opened it. Closed it.My hands wouldn't cooperate. My brain wouldn't cooperate.Everything felt wrong.Niklaus was here. At the workshop. Sending cryptic texts to Aria while standing forty meters away from Kesley. Calling repeatedly with that unreadable voice asking strange questions about happiness.What did that mean? What was he doing?My phone buzzed on the bed. Then again. Then again.I flipped it face-down.Buzzed again.I picked it up, put it on silent, and buried it at the bottom of my bag under three days' worth of clothes.Then I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall.The wall was unhelpful.At some point the morning passed in this state of restless, useless anxiety—me staring at various surfaces, rehearsing conversations that went nowhere, the muffled sounds of the venue outside my window doing nothing to ground me.At 11:55, Dante's voice carried clea

Chapter 100 ~ Niklaus ~ The training session moved to a large open room that faced the water, floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, whiteboards and screens on the other. Comfortable chairs arranged in a loose semicircle that suggested collaborative discussion rather than lecture. Ben Hartley had clearly done this before. He set up with the ease of someone for whom any space quickly became a working environment, pulling up data sets on the main screen, arranging reference materials with the organized confidence of a person who thought well on his feet. I took a chair slightly outside the semicircle. Observer position. CEO-attending-but-not-imposing. The appropriate level of presence for a senior executive joining a team session. That was my intention. It lasted approximately four minutes. "Let's start with something concrete," Ben said, pulling up a data visualization on the screen. "This is a real anonymized data set from a mid-size tech company. I want you to look at it