Semua Bab Reborn To Seduce My Bully's Alpha Father : Bab 171 - Bab 180

Chapter 171The programme met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.A community rebuilding initiative in the southern district, one of the territories that had been hit hardest by the Council's old resource allocation policies, the ones that Kane's coalition was now working to reverse. Old buildings being renovated. Infrastructure being repaired. Work that required bodies and patience and the willingness to show up at seven in the morning and do something unglamorous until it was done.Caden had found it through a contact at the construction firm.He'd shown up the first Tuesday not knowing what to expect and had been handed a set of overalls and a task list and been pointed toward a building that needed its entire ground floor replastered.He hadn't replastered anything in his life.The man who showed him how was sixty-three years old, missing two fingers on his left hand from an industrial accident, and had absolutely no interest in who Caden's father was.That had been, Caden would thi

Chapter 173The requests started arriving in the third week.Not all at once. Gradually, the way consequences arrived when something large had been set in motion, first a trickle, then a steady flow, then something that required its own system of management.Three territories in the eastern region had formally cited my mother's research in challenges to their own Council-imposed resource allocations. Two had produced results, one positive, one volatile enough that Kane had dispatched a coalition representative to manage the response before it became something worse. The third was still in process, which Dante's briefing described as developing with uncertain trajectory, which was his careful language for, could go either way and nobody knows yet.Kane called every other day.Matthias had been asked to advise on territory disputes he had no direct connection to because his name was now attached to the coalition that had released the research and people in complicated situations wanted

Chapter 175Marcus came to the estate on a Thursday morning with a folder and an expression that said he'd been awake for most of the night and found it worthwhile.He sat across from me and Matthias in the library and put the folder on the table and looked at it for a moment before he spoke."Dorian has been talking to me," he said. "For three weeks. Every evening. Going through everything he knows about Cassius's legal architecture." He held my gaze. "I've been taking it apart piece by piece and passing it to Caine's legal team.""You didn't tell me," I said."No," he said. "Because I wanted to be certain it was going to work before I told you it was happening." He opened the folder. "I'm certain now."The vulnerability was specific.Dorian had known about it for years, had known it was there somewhere in the architecture, had suspected it from the structure of the original European Territorial Court filings, but hadn't been able to locate it precisely without access to documents he

Chapter 177The chamber had settled into its particular formal quiet after my last words.Cassius was still sitting across the table. He hadn't moved when I stood. He was looking at the surface between us with the expression of a man doing something he rarely did, sitting inside a moment rather than managing it.I stayed standing.Caine and the witnesses were present but held back, giving the space its shape without filling it. Matthias was near the wall, still, watching with the specific quality of someone who had decided to trust a situation they couldn't fully control and was managing that decision one breath at a time.Dante was near the door.I looked at Cassius.At the silver hair and the European tailoring and the seven decades of a life built entirely inside a framework that had never once required him to question whether it was correct. At the man who had looked at my mother's research and seen an opportunity rather than a truth. Who had cultivated her trust and then used it

Chapter 179 He came on a Tuesday morning with boxes. Not many. The accumulated personal effects of a man who had spent years keeping himself deliberately portable, a few framed photographs, some books that had been with him long enough to matter, the particular small objects that end up on academic desks and mean nothing to anyone else. He had already cleared his office. The university had already been notified. He was leaving quietly, the way he had done everything. I met him in the car park. He looked at me for a moment with those sharp eyes that his academic appearance spent so much energy disguising, and something in his face had the quality it always had when he was arriving at the end of something that had cost him a great deal to carry. "You don't have to help with the boxes," he said. "I know," I said. "I'm not here for the boxes." He set the one he was holding in the boot of his car and turned to face me properly. "How are you?" he said. The real question. Not the con