All Chapters of My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Lars came into Roman's office at eight fifty on a Friday and closed the door behind him.Lars only closed the door when the news should not travel through walls. Roman put down his coffee and waited.Lars opened a folder on the desk. Three shell companies, all incorporated within the past four months, all quietly accumulate Ashford Global debt through separate brokers in separate jurisdictions. Small individual positions. The kind of activity that looked like ordinary market movement unless you mapped everything together, at which point the pattern was unmistakable. They were buying toward a covenant threshold. Patiently. Methodically. The same foundational strategy as the Harlan attempted eight months ago, refined to account for how that one had been stopped."Same playbook," Roman said."Adjusted. Whoever is running this watched what happened last time and corrected it for the gaps." Lars pointed to the third shell company's ownership chain. "We followed it back through four layers.

Roman called the meeting for seven in the morning.Hartwell, Garrett, and Lars were already in the conference room when he arrived. Coffee on the table. Documents spread in the order they had been reviewed. The specific stillness of three people who had all looked at the same information and were waiting to find out what he planned to do about it.Roman sat down. "Talk me through it."Lars went first. He walked the ownership trace in the order it had been uncovered. Three shell companies, four layers of holding structures, one terminal entity at the end of the chain. He laid the pages out as he went. His hands were steady. He had done this kind of briefing before, and he did not editorialize."Fenn Aldric." Lars pointed to the name. "Old money. The Ashford family blocked one of his acquisitions in the early nineties, and he has been working the outside of your market position ever since. Patiently." He turned the page. "He has done this before. Three companies in the past twelve years

Sunday dinner at the estate had been the same since Sera was a child.Same table. Same dishes. Same comfortable quiet between her and Savio, that meant nothing except they were both present, and that was enough. She had a glass of wine. He had water. The food was good. It was ordinary. It was the one part of her week that remained exactly what it had always been.Then, between the main course and whatever came after, Savio said: "Roman Ashford came to see me."Sera looked up."Tuesday," Savio said. He cut a small piece of food and ate it without any change in expression. "We had tea."Sera put her fork down. "Excuse me."Not a question. The flat, specific sound of a person who has heard something correctly and needs a moment before they respond to it."He came about Aldric," Savio said. "He needed intelligence his team didn't have access to. I gave him a starting point.""Papa." She kept her voice even. The effort of keeping it even was a separate, physical thing. "You had no right to

Milan worked the way it always worked for her.The first day was meetings. The foundation oversight review ran three hours and covered everything it needed to cover. The property negotiation in the afternoon went better than projected. The counterpart across the table was experienced and direct, and the terms they landed on by five were terms she could bring back to the board without qualification.She ate dinner alone at a small place near the hotel, pasta and a glass of red wine and the next day's documents open in front of her, and felt, for the first time in several weeks, like the full dimensions of herself were present and accounted for.The second day was more of the same. By the third, she had found her rhythm.Milan had always done this. The city operated on its own logic, older and more settled than the one she lived inside at home, and something about being inside a different logic gave her room she did not always have at her own desk in her own building with the drawer clo

# Chapter 39: The Call to SavioSavio answered on the second ring."Mr. Ashford." No surprise in it. The voice of a man who had been expecting a call from Roman at some point and had simply been waiting to find out when."I have information that concerns your family," Roman said. "I need twenty minutes.""You have them," Savio said. "Go ahead."Roman went through it in the order Lars had presented it. The audit. The messages. Isabella's contact in Aldric's network and the six months of communication between them. He gave the timeline precisely: when the first message had been sent, what it contained, how the intelligence had been structured and delivered. He described the covenant data she had shared, the board vulnerability analysis, the timing windows she had identified, and reported.Savio said nothing. He listened the way he did everything, with complete attention and without any sound that suggested he was processing or reacting. He was simply present on the line, taking in what