All Chapters of Betrayed, I Become The CEO'S Contracted Bride: Chapter 221 - Chapter 225

Alexander set two mugs on the bench before he said anything, which meant he'd come up the stairs already knowing he was going to ask.He'd made tea in the small kitchen on the floor below, the kettle there instead of the one in the lab, and he'd carried both mugs up rather than calling her down, and Elara watched him do the last of it, slide one across the steel to the spot where her hand already was, and understood that the tea was the part of the question he'd decided to lead with."You've been short with Chen for three days," he said. He pulled the stool around and sat where he could see her face instead of her profile. "You logged the pediatric panel twice. You don't log anything twice.""The first entry had the wrong timestamp.""It didn't." He wrapped both hands around his own mug and left hers alone. "I checked, because I wanted to be wrong before I asked you."She turned her chair a degree toward him. The air-gapped terminal behind her was dark, wiped, the message four days go

Elara had the release calendar open on the wall screen before the board members finished sitting down, because the date was the only thing in the room she intended to leave unchanged.Eleven days. The corrected formula went public in eleven days, the full synthesis pathway and the trial data and the three independent verifications, released under a license that meant no one could ever own it again, least of all the people who had owned it before. She had set the date four months ago. She had built every downstream commitment around it. She stood at the head of the table with the calendar behind her and waited for the meeting to become about something else, because a meeting called two weeks before a release she'd already locked was never about the release."We've all read the readiness memo," she said. "Manufacturing partners are briefed. The three labs have signed their verification statements. MIT, Edinburgh, São Paulo. Unless there's a scientific objection I haven't heard, the date

Elara came to do the neuro check at four because Mira's afternoon scores were her best and she wanted the cleanest reading the day could give her.The girl was at the window seat in the care suite, a tablet on her knees, the residential floor quiet around her in the way Elara had built it to be quiet, soft surfaces and no overhead fluorescents and a door that locked only from the inside. Mira was nine. She had been stabilized for six weeks. The headaches were gone, the seizures were gone, the integration had held, and what was left was a child who had been engineered for isolation and was now, against the entire design of her, learning to want company."You're early," Mira said, without looking up. "You said four-thirty.""I said four." Elara set the case down and pulled the chair around. "The light's better now.""You always say the light." Mira put the tablet face-down. She had a way of giving her whole attention at once, like a switch, and it landed on Elara now. "Are we doing the