All Chapters of Betrayed, I Become The CEO'S Contracted Bride: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The heavy oak door at the end of the east wing was supposed to be locked.Elara knew this because she had walked past the security keypad dozens of times over the last six weeks. It always displayed a solid, glowing red indicator. It marked the hard boundary of Alexander's private space.But tonight, at eleven forty-three on a Wednesday, the keypad was blinking amber.The penthouse was completely silent. Her laboratory sequences had run late, and her sleep schedule was entirely broken. She had only come down to the residential floor for a glass of water. She stood at the bottom of the main staircase, holding her empty glass, and stopped.She watched the amber light pulse in the dim hallway. An amber light meant a physical error. The door was resting open by a fraction of an inch. The heavy latch had not fully caught the frame.She should have turned around. She should have walked right back upstairs to the safety of her lab.Instead, she set her water glass on the hallway console tabl

The following morning, Elara swiped her keycard and entered the laboratory at exactly six-fifteen.The early hour was not an anomaly. The anomaly was the fact that she had been awake since four that morning. She had spent two hours lying perfectly still in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to run the variables of the previous night through a logical sequence. Her mind had kept looping the data, trying to resolve an equation that refused to balance.Eventually, she had abandoned the attempt and gone to work.She pulled up the overnight synthesis data on the primary monitor. She stared at the scrolling numbers without actually reading them.Her mind was entirely occupied by the piano room. By the heavy layer of dust on the Steinway. By the photographs on the wall, and the way Alexander had stood in the center of the room with his hands flat against his sides. She remembered the exact tone of his voice when he said, He had your eyes. She remembered the massive, structural cost of

The pharmaceutical summit gala was massive, but as soon as Elara walked through the double doors of the ballroom, she realized something fundamental had changed.Six weeks ago at the Golden Gala, she had treated the crowded room like a hostile environment she barely survived. Tonight, she stepped off the red carpet and read the ballroom the exact same way she read a laboratory bench. She knew which variables required immediate attention, which could be safely ignored, and which ones were likely to react badly to each other.She recognized fourteen major players in the first ten minutes. She spotted the two medical journal editors who were actually worth talking to. She saw the aggressive corporate lawyer Alexander despised holding court near the ice sculpture. She even recognized the woman in the dark green dress standing by the bar—one of the only four working scientists who had refused to scrub Elara's name from their research papers after Aethelgard destroyed her reputation.Alexan

Natasha shifted her weight, turning her full attention back to Elara. She offered a bright, flawless smile."You must find all of this terribly overwhelming." Natasha’s tone carried a heavy, manufactured warmth. "These industry events take years to navigate properly. The invisible hierarchies, the politics, the endless posturing. I imagine it is quite a shock to the system, stepping out of a quiet research laboratory into a room like this.""Research laboratories have their own hierarchies and politics." Elara kept her voice perfectly conversational. "The difference is that the politics in a lab are usually about who actually deserves the credit for the work." She held Natasha’s gaze without blinking. "I have a great deal of experience with that particular dynamic."Natasha’s smile remained fixed in place, but her eyes hardened. She absorbed the subtle redirection and immediately pivoted back to Alexander."Of course." Natasha reached out and lightly brushed the lapel of Alexander’s s

The black Maybach pulled away from the gala at exactly eleven-forty.The city moved past the tinted windows in a blur of gray buildings and cold streetlights. Elara watched the reflection of the passing lamps without really seeing them. In her peripheral vision, Alexander sat with one forearm resting against the door. He wasn't looking at her. He was staring out the side window, his face caught in the glass, still carrying the rigid tension from the encounter with Natasha.The silence in the car felt different tonight. Usually, their quiet was easy—the kind of space shared by two people who didn't feel the need to perform. This silence was sharp. It felt like a wire pulled too tight.Elara thought back to the files she had read that morning. She had spent hours looking through Natasha Volkov’s career, tracking her climb to the top of Meridian BioSolutions and the aggressive way she took over smaller companies. At the time, she had told herself it was just homework. She wanted to know