Alle Kapitel von The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride: Kapitel 11 – Kapitel 20

POV: Lena Moretti I found him in his office at ten o'clock that night. He was at his desk reading something on his laptop and he looked up when I walked in without knocking. The blood debt contract was in my hand. All forty-one pages. I dropped it on his desk and watched his eyes move to the document and then back to me. He knew immediately what it was and what I'd found. "Page twenty-nine," I said. "The default provision. The generational claim clause." He closed his laptop. Slowly. The way someone sets down a tool when they know the work is about to change. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me with an expression that was careful and measured and completely infuriating. "You knew about it," I said. Not a question. "Yes." "From the beginning. Before the rehearsal dinner. Before you offered me the deal. Before I signed anything." "Yes." "And you didn't tell me." He paused. Not because he didn't have an answer. Because he was choosing which version of the answer to give

POV: Lena Moretti The nightmare always starts the same way. The rehearsal dinner. The long table with white flowers. Julian's hand on my thigh. Then the study. The lock clicking shut. His face changing. The mask peeling away. But in the dream, I don't get out. In the dream, the door doesn't open. I fight and it doesn't matter. I scream and nobody comes. The room gets smaller and his hands get stronger and there's no east wing hallway, no open door, no man standing in the light saying "wrong brother." There's just Julian and the locked room and the sound of fabric tearing and my own voice begging someone, anyone, to help me. I woke up screaming. Not a gasp or a sharp inhale. A real scream, loud enough to hurt my throat. I was sitting upright in bed, sheets twisted around my legs, sweat on my neck. My hands were gripping the mattress so hard my knuckles were white. The room was dark. The penthouse was silent. For three horrible seconds I didn't know where I was. Then the knock came.

POV: Lena Moretti The retreat was at a lake house an hour outside the city. One of Ezra's business partners hosted it every year, a weekend of meetings and dinners and golf that nobody actually cared about. What they cared about was access. Two days in close quarters with the people who moved money in this city. Ezra needed to be there. I needed to be next to him. Naomi drove us up on Friday afternoon. Ezra read documents the entire ride and I stared out the window and tried not to think about the fact that the retreat coordinator had booked us a shared suite. Two bedrooms with a short hallway between them and walls that were, as I discovered when we arrived, approximately the thickness of a napkin. I could hear Ezra hang up his jacket. I could hear him set his phone on the nightstand. I could hear him exhale. This was going to be a long weekend. The corporate dinner started at six. Twelve people around a long table. Ezra's business partner at the head, various executives and thei

POV: Lena Moretti I couldn't sleep. My mouth still felt like it belonged to someone else. Someone who kissed dangerous men on balconies while the enemy watched from inside. Someone who grabbed a man's jacket and pulled him closer instead of pushing him away. I lay in bed for an hour replaying the kiss in fragments. His hand in my hair. The sound I made against his lips. His forehead against mine. That wasn't strategy. I know. I know. Two words. The most loaded two words I'd ever spoken, and I'd said "I do" at a hijacked wedding three weeks ago. At least "I do" was part of a plan. "I know" was just the truth, and the truth was that I'd kissed my husband because I wanted to, and that wanting terrified me more than anything Julian had done on that balcony. Around one in the morning I gave up on sleep and got out of bed. The penthouse was dark and quiet. Ezra's bedroom door was closed. No pacing tonight. Either the kiss had settled something in him or he was lying awake the same way I

POV: Lena Moretti We hadn't talked about the kiss. Three days and not a single word about it. We worked. We ate. We occupied the same spaces inside The Obsidian and moved around each other with the careful precision of two people who knew exactly where the boundary was because they'd already crossed it once and barely survived. He didn't touch me. I didn't bring it up. We were professionals. We were adults. We were absolutely, completely lying to ourselves. The work that night was legitimate. Ezra wanted the original blood debt documents, not the copies Naomi had given me, but the physical originals held somewhere in Victor's personal archives. Exposing them publicly would destroy Victor's reputation and potentially trigger legal challenges from every family trapped in the system. But first we needed to trace the chain of custody. Where the documents were created. Where they were stored. Who had access. Whether copies existed that Victor could use to claim the originals were forgeri