Semua Bab My Secretary Is The Mistress: Bab 61 - Bab 70

QUITE THREAD Helen had been home for two days now. One night spent at the hidden mansion with Cole, wrapped in his shirt and his arms and a piece she hadn't expected to find anywhere, let alone there. The second day spent with Linda, the two of them working through a backlog of tasks neither had managed during the chaos of the takeover attempt — and then, almost on impulse, she'd taken the short train out to see her mother. Margaret noticed the change almost immediately. Helen had always come home before, in fragments and pauses.  This time, something else was different. It wasn't just the quiet that had settled over her daughter, the way she seemed to be holding something carefully behind her eyes. It was the clothes. Margaret stood in the doorway of Helen's small bedroom one afternoon, arms folded lightly acros

 THE FIRST BLOW The photograph remained on the screen above the reception desk, enormous and unavoidable, filling every inch of the mounted television that usually ran quiet business updates nobody paid attention to. The headline beneath it seemed almost too large to process at first glance. **COLE DESIGNS CEO'S SECRET AFFAIR EXPOSED** The lobby had gone silent — not completely, not the silence of an empty building, but that particular, suffocating silence that descends over a crowded room when everyone has simultaneously stopped what they were doing to understand the same thing. The woman in the photograph wasn't immediately recognizable. Her face was turned into Cole's chest, hidden beneath the angle of his shoulder, and whatever might have identified her had been blurred slightly — whether by distance or deliberate choice, it was impossible to say from here. A detail that

WHATEVER IT TAKES The elevator doors opened. They remained exactly as they were — Helen still within the circle of his arms, Cole holding her with the particular deliberateness of someone memorizing the shape of something they're afraid of losing. The doors slid fully apart, and the noise of the executive floor rushed back in around them, voices and phones and the ambient hum of a building trying to convince itself that today was a normal Monday. It wasn't. Cole stepped back first. Reluctantly, with the careful precision of a man returning a mask to his face because the audience had arrived. His expression smoothed itself back into the composed, unreadable authority that had built his company and survived every crisis thrown at it. "Helen," he said softly. She looked up at him. "Go to your office." Her brows drew toge

 THE WRONG VICTORY The cameras flashed relentlessly. Questions hammered over one another, voices competing for volume, microphones angled forward like weapons. The noise of the gathered press blended into a dull, undifferentiated roar somewhere at the back of Cole's mind, because he barely heard any of it. All he could think about was the clock. Twenty minutes on Lyla's countdown. Eighteen. Maybe less now, depending on how long he'd spent in the elevator. And somewhere upstairs, behind a closed office door on the executive floor, Helen was watching the live stream on her phone. Waiting. Wondering why he hadn't come to find her the way he'd promised he would. His fingers curled once at his side. Then he forced them to relax. "Mr. Lucas, who is the woman in the photograph?"

 THE CHOICE Cole stared across the gathered crowd. And for the first time all afternoon, something inside him went completely still. Not because of Lyla's arrival. Not because she was standing there at the edge of the press line with that composed, patient smile that had once made him believe she was a woman who understood grace. It was the man beside her. Cole recognized him immediately — not from recent memory, but from years of shared conference rooms and confidential documents and late-night calls about matters that never left the room. A man who had once sat across from him and knew exactly where every legal vulnerability in his company lived, exactly which clauses in which contracts could be weaponized, exactly how much damage could be done by someone with access to the right information at the right moment. His former attorney.