All Chapters of My Sister's Fiance: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Northlake’s twenty-first floor changed in under ten seconds.No alarm screamed. No red lights spun overhead like some cheap movie. Expensive buildings had their own way of panicking.More polite.Quieter.More disgusting.Outside the glass walls of the war room, the small light above the elevator access panel shifted from white to amber. The executive suite door at the far right end of the hall locked automatically with a soft click, far too elegant a sound for a situation where someone had just used a token under Nathaniel de Sanctis’s name from this very floor to terminate every session my team had open.An assistant carrying a stack of folders stopped mid-step.The finance guy who’d been pretending to check the wall clock like gossip could somehow be disguised as an interest in time looked at the elevator, then at the person beside him. That person looked at their tablet.The tablet suddenly looked like evidence.It was as if everyone on this floor had abruptly remembered they had

“I haven’t said you did.”“But everyone’s looking at me.”“Everyone looks at whatever’s easiest to see.” I glanced at the badge sitting in the tray. “That’s how tricks work.”“Your badge registered near the old executive records room two minutes before the session termination,” Zach finally said, his voice flat.Emily started crying.The tears came all at once, her face crumpling with the realization that the professional world didn’t care how many times she said no or how desperately she meant it.“I wasn’t there,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I’m scared of the records corridor. The lights go out all the time. I even asked Marissa to get a folder from there yesterday because... I know this sounds stupid, but that room is creepy.”“Valid,” Levi said.I glanced at him.He immediately looked down.“Wait.” Arun suddenly sat straighter.Everyone stopped.I was behind his chair in a second. “What?”He zoomed in on the badge-access subsystem log he’d managed to pull from a small cache

An hour later, Northlake’s twenty-first floor looked like an office again.I made sure of it.The old executive records room had been sealed. The black laptop, the sticky note, the charger, and everything else on that desk were now in evidence handling under Claire’s supervision, Zach’s security team, and a forensic crew whose names I hadn’t even learned before they started putting on gloves and speaking in sentences deliberately designed to be boring.Emily was back at her desk after spending almost twenty minutes crying in the restroom with Marissa.The finance guy in the gray shirt turned out to genuinely just have a habit of staring at elevators when he got nervous.Sad, but not criminal.The elevators were running again under new restrictions. People could move between floors once their badges had been reverified. The executive suite was open. There were still twice as many security people as before, but they’d moved out of the middle of the hallway and gone back to being expensi

I didn’t dream.Or maybe I did, and my brain, finally given the chance to die for a little while after spending the past few weeks working overtime as a disaster command center, decided not to save the footage.All I remember is warmth.The couch beneath me. The blanket pulled up to my waist. The AC that had felt too cold earlier now felt just right. And a few times, somewhere inside the kind of sleep so deep I’d lost all awareness of where my own body was, something moved gently through my hair.One stroke.Then stillness.A few minutes later, maybe a few seconds, maybe an entirely new lifetime, something brushed the hair away from my temple again, so softly that all I did was make a quiet sound and sink deeper into the pillow.Warm.Quiet.Safe.“Mommyyy.”I didn’t move.“Mommy.” Another voice came from the other side.Still nothing.“Mommyyyyy~ wake up, Mommy~ luuunch.” Then two voices whispered together, much closer this time.I frowned and tried to pull the blanket higher.One of

I washed my face long enough for the last traces of sleep to disappear and my brain to belong to me again. The cold water helped. Once I'd patted my face dry with a towel, I looked at myself in the mirror.Hair slightly messy.Lipstick half gone.A little pillow crease near my cheek.Sexy.I combed my fingers through my hair and headed back out.I could already hear the kids before I even made it back to the main office.“Daddy, that’s mine.”“You haven’t touched it.”“But I picked it.”“Picking something doesn’t make it yours.”“That literally makes it mine.”“No,” Max said. “If I pick a car on the street, it doesn’t become mine.”Issa clicked her tongue. “Because you’re little.”“What does that have to do with anything?”“If Daddy picks a car, maybe it becomes Daddy’s.”I stopped at the end of the hallway.Silence.“Technically, no,” Zach said, perfectly calm.Bianna immediately burst out laughing.I stepped into the next room.Apparently, the private wing also had a small dining ro