All Chapters of THE WRONG SISTER : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

A call came at six forty-five the next morning.Caelum was already awake. He’d been awake since four, sitting at his desk with the necklace in his hand and a contract he hadn’t read on the surface in front of him. He picked up on the first ring.“Silas?” he said.Silas’s voice was tight in a way it almost never was. “Viktor filed a hostile acquisition notice on Verdant Green Tech forty minutes ago. It went public at six-thirty.”“What?” Caelum put the necklace down. “Say that again,” he said.“He filed against Verdant. The green tech subsidiary.” A pause. “He’s going after it directly.”“He can’t. The regulatory protection...”“He’s not going through the front door. He’s doing it through Verdant’s minority shareholders. Two of them have already signed over their voting rights to an Ashbourne proxy. If he gets a third, he has enough to force a board review and stall every major decision the subsidiary makes for six months minimum.”Caelum was already standing. “Who are those shareholde

Viktor Ashbourne could absorb a large setback with something close to grace — redirect, restructure, move on. But small losses irritated him in a specific way. Like something that had no business stopping him had stopped him anyway and he couldn’t immediately work out how.The tech firm acquisition failing was a stone in a shoe.He found out Thursday morning when his legal team called to say that heads of terms for a strategic partnership between the tech firm and the florist had been filed with the district registry Wednesday evening. Joint IP. Shared operational infrastructure. Mission framework legally entangled across both entities in a way that made a clean acquisition of either one effectively impossible without triggering a full dual-entity review.He listened to the whole explanation without saying a word.Then he said, “Who drafted it?”“We don’t know yet. It’s not a standard template. The language is… specific. Whoever wrote it knew exactly what clause they were protecting ag

The paparazzo had been going through the shots for two hours. Most of them had blurry edges, the wrong angle, the subject half-turned away. That was fine.But the third one.He stopped on the third one and just sat there at his kitchen table with his cold tea looking at it.The woman was laughing at something. Head tilted back, completely unguarded. Her left hand was resting on her stomach. Not deliberately. It was natural.And the stomach it was resting on was unmistakably, five or six months pregnant.He pulled up the Crowe article on his laptop. The comparison photos from eight months ago. The same grey eyes, same jaw, and the slight build.He put them side by side with his shot.Completely different hair but that wasn’t a disguise, that was just a Tuesday.He picked up his phone.His editor picked up almost immediately, which meant she was still awake, which meant he wasn’t the only one working late.“I’ve got Arwen Valehart,” he said.She didn’t say anything for a second. “The Rav

Nobody moved.The senior counsel had stopped writing mid-sentence.“Caelum.” The senior counsel’s voice came out careful. “We don’t have to…”“Give us the room,” Silas said quietly.She looked at him.“Both of you,” Silas said. “Now… please.”She gathered her folders and stood up. The junior counsel was already standing. The door opened and closed and then it was just the two of them in the room with Viktor’s proposal still on the screen.The room was completely quiet.Caelum hadn’t moved. He was standing at the end of the table with the phone in his hand and his eyes on the screen and some expression on his face that Silas had never seen before in several years of working with him.Silas waited. The silence stretched.Caelum put the phone on the table.“The timeline,” Caelum said.His voice came out rough at the edges.“Caelum…”“The press conference was five months ago.” He wasn’t talking to Silas. He was talking to the photo. “Before that, the estate. Before that…”He stopped. And

The office was quiet.She was building a kingdom. And she hadn’t left him a door.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Rowan came back at midnight. And found Caelum still at his desk.He hadn’t moved in two hours. The phone was in front of him, the photo still open, and the necklace was beside it and he hadn’t touched either one since Rowan left.Rowan set a folder on the desk without being asked.Caelum looked at it.“Everything?” he said.“Everything we have so far.”He opened it.The first page was a map. The Garment District marked in sections, fourteen businesses circled in red, connecting lines drawn between them showing the network structure.The second page was a business breakdown. The co-op. The print shop. The boutique. The café where she worked evening shifts. A fund registered under community development finance law with a board structure so clean that his own lawyers had not been able to find a weakness in it.On the third page, there was a photo.Not the tabloid shot. A different one, taken