All Chapters of My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret : Chapter 81 - Chapter 89

The filing went in on a Thursday.Garrett and the Montague legal team had coordinated the submission over two weeks, building the evidence package from Lars's documentation and the Montague intelligence files and the shell company exposure that had been accumulating since the first forty-seven page file arrived on Roman's desk. Comprehensive. Exact. Quiet. No press statement. No advance notice. Both families preferred it that way and had said so through separate channels without needing to discuss it directly.The three remaining shell companies were exposed and frozen by the end of business Thursday. The regulatory investigation opened Friday morning on three separate counts, arising apparently independently from different directions because that was how the documentation had been structured.Aldric's operational network had no remaining functional components.Roman was at his desk when Lars brought the confirmation. He was working, doing what he now did in the hours after the signif

Dante had been watching Sera Montague for eleven years. He had watched her take the company from her father's hands without dropping a single thing. He had watched her organize a marriage around a man who was not paying attention and then leave it without making a scene. He had watched her go to Milan and come back with yellow flowers and something restored that had been quietly disappearing for three years. He was good at watching. It was the most useful thing he did. He had been watching Roman Ashford for considerably less time. The past year had provided sufficient material. He had watched Roman come to the estate gate on a Tuesday night in November and sit there for twenty-three minutes without once calling through to be let in. Dante had been at a different window than Sera when the headlights pulled away. He had noted the time. Not one phone call to the intercom. Not one request. Twenty-three minutes and then gone. He had watched Sera stand at her window for four minutes af

He sent it on a Saturday morning from his own phone. Not through Garrett. Not through Dante's number, which had become the channel for things that needed a third party between them. His own phone, his own number, which she would not have saved because he had never texted her directly from it. Not during the marriage, when they had lived together and had not needed to. Not after, when there had been nothing to say and then things that had been routed through proper channels that had held both of them at the correct distance. He had stepped outside the proper channels. He had written the message in the study and looked at it for six minutes and then sent it without changing a word. He put the phone on the desk and sat with what he had done. He did not know if she would save his number. He did not know if she would respond, or when, or what the response would be when it came. He had sent it anyway, which was the point, which had always been the point since the letter, since the gate

Roman called Dante on a Wednesday afternoon.He had been thinking about it since Monday. Since the two words arrived and he had put the phone in his pocket and gone back to work with the specific quality of someone who had received something that changed the shape of a day without requiring any immediate action. He had thought about it on Tuesday and had not called. He had thought about it again Wednesday morning and had waited until the afternoon, until the desk was clear and the Hartwell meeting was done and he had no practical reason to delay except making sure, one more time, that he was doing this the right way.He picked up the phone and called.Dante answered on the third ring. The neutral professional register he used for calls that had not yet established a category."I want to ask Sera to dinner," Roman said. No preamble. "One dinner. There is no agenda. No pressure. No assumptions about what it means or where it goes."A brief pause."Then ask her," Dante said."I'm asking