All Chapters of HIS SECRET ADDICTION: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Alex's POV"Farrow called me yesterday," my mother said. "I called her back this morning."I sat down on Damien's couch."Mom.""Don't use that voice. I'm not a child." She said it with the particular patience of someone who'd been waiting to have this conversation for twenty years and wasn't going to be managed through it. "She found me through public records. My employment history with Cross Industries. She was professional. She identified herself and her piece and she asked if I'd be willing to talk.""And you said yes.""I said I needed to think about it. Then I thought about it." A pause. "Then I called her back."I looked at Damien across the room. He was reading my face the way he did, absorbing the half of the conversation he couldn't hear and filling in the rest accurately."What did you tell her," I said."Everything." My mother's voice was steady. The kind of steady that takes years to build. "My name. My position at Cross Industries. What Richard Sterling did. What the com

Alex's POVMarcus brought it himself. A sealed envelope, standard size, Damien's name on the front in Trevor's handwriting. Clean and unhurried, like someone who'd taken their time because they weren't worried about being chased.We were in Damien's office. Me, Marcus, Sophie on the phone from her office two floors down. The envelope sat on the desk between us like something that had decided to be patient."London," Damien said."Heathrow flight. Left two hours ago." Marcus had his hands in his pockets. The specific stillness of someone who'd read the situation and decided the most useful thing he could do was not add to it. "He checked out of his hotel this morning. Before he called you.""He was never going to the meeting," I said."No." Marcus looked at the envelope. "He'd already decided what he was doing before he made the call.""The call was to make sure Damien would be at the club tonight," I said. "So the envelope would be received and not ignored.""Theatrical," Sophie said

Alex's PovSophie met us in the corridor outside the boardroom.She had the drive in a small evidence bag, which told me she was already thinking about what came after the board meeting. Sophie Chen always prepared for the thing after the thing."How much time," Damien said."Fifteen minutes before they're all seated." She looked at me briefly. "You need to hear this too."She walked us to the small conference room adjacent to the boardroom. Closed the door. Pulled up her laptop."The Hargrove documents are there. Clear chain. Richard requested them from Victoria, reconstructed the full terms, and transmitted them to a Meridian-adjacent LLC through an encrypted channel he apparently didn't know our IT security logs." She turned the laptop to face us. "That's not what I'm showing you."She opened a second folder.Scanned documents. Old ones. The resolution was slightly degraded the way things were when someone had photographed physical files rather than run them through a proper scanne

Damien's POVI have sat in this boardroom through hostile takeover attempts, through quarterly losses that made grown men sweat through their shirts, through the year my father died and I had to stand at the head of this table three days later and convince eleven people that I was capable of carrying what he'd built. I have never once felt what I felt right now, which was the very specific terror of watching someone I loved stand in the line of fire I had accidentally walked him into.Richard's eyes were on Alex like a hand around a throat, and every instinct I had was screaming at me to step between them. I didn't. Because stepping between them was exactly what Richard wanted. He wanted me reactive. He wanted the room to see me protecting Alex instead of prosecuting him, because the moment this looked personal, the evidence became secondary and the story became about us.So I kept my hands flat on the table and my voice level and I looked at Hargrove. "The transmission records show t

Alex's POVI had expected something. Relief, maybe, or the kind of rush you get when something you've been bracing for finally lands and passes. But when Richard Sterling stood up from that table and walked out of the boardroom without another word, his chair still pushed back at the wrong angle and his photograph still lying face up in the middle of the table, what I felt was nothing dramatic at all. Just quiet. The specific kind of quiet that follows something loud for so long that the silence itself feels like a sound.Damien let go of my hand the moment Richard stood. Not because he was hiding it. I think because he already knew what the next twenty minutes would require and he was shifting back into the mode the room needed from him. I understood that. I let him go without holding tighter and watched him move through what came next with the same steadiness he'd carried all evening.The board stayed for another forty minutes. Patricia asked careful, measured questions about next s