บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

POV: Lena Moretti The trap sprung on a Friday. Naomi's external surveillance picked up the signal at 9:14 AM. Julian made a phone call to his personal broker requesting information about a pharmaceutical acquisition target in Southeast Asia. The same fake target I'd designed as bait number four. Specific details. Correct numbers. The exact fabricated scenario I'd built for suspect number four on our list. Suspect four was a man named Reeves. Mid-level security operative. Three years with Blackthorn. Clean record. Good performance reviews. The kind of employee who blended into the background because he never did anything notable enough to stand out. Which, I was learning, was exactly the profile you'd expect from someone hiding something. Ezra didn't react when Naomi delivered the confirmation. He read the report, set it down, and said, "Bring him to the conference room on sixteen." The same flat voice he'd used during the interrogations. The same controlled stillness. I'd watched h

POV: Lena Moretti I woke up in my bed. Alone. At some point during the night he'd carried me here, or I'd walked, or we'd stumbled together through the dark penthouse. I couldn't remember. What I remembered was the floor. The wall. His mouth. His whispered confession against the back of my neck. I was never going to use you. I just didn't know how to keep you. I lay there for ten minutes staring at the ceiling and running an inventory of my body. Sore in places that made me flush. A faint bruise on my hip where his fingers had gripped too hard. The ghost sensation of his hand tracing my spine. I pressed my face into the pillow and it smelled like him and that was somehow worse than all the rest of it combined because it meant he'd been here. In my bed. Close enough to leave his scent on my pillow. And then he'd left before I woke up. I got dressed and walked to the kitchen and he was already there. Dressed for work. Suit jacket on. Hair combed. Coffee made. He looked exactly like t

POV: Lena Moretti After the board meeting, I couldn't stop thinking about Victor's face when he looked at me. The warmth in it. The recognition. Like I was a door to a room he'd been locked out of for decades. It made me want to scrub my skin. It also made me want to understand. So I went back to the numbers because numbers don't look at you like they're remembering someone else. I already knew about the three other families from my earlier research. The Chens, the Azaris, the Petrovs. Shell companies matched to blood debt contracts. Young women traded through honor arrangements. But I'd only scratched the surface. Now I went deeper. I pulled every public record I could find. Marriage certificates, property transfers, business registrations, court filings, obituaries. I built a file on each woman the way I'd build a case for a forensic audit. Piece by piece. Document by document. Following the paper trail of three lives that had been consumed by the same machine that was trying to c

POV: Lena Moretti Five days since the living room floor. Five days of professional distance and controlled silences and his hand not quite touching mine when he passed me documents. Five days of pretending that I hadn't heard what he whispered against my skin in the dark. I was never going to use you. I just didn't know how to keep you. Five days of watching him rebuild his walls brick by brick while I stood on the other side wondering why I kept letting men put barriers between us and calling it protection. I was tired of it. Tired of the distance. Tired of the pretending. Tired of lying in bed at midnight listening to him pace his office and knowing that both of us were thinking about the same thing and neither of us was doing anything about it because doing something would mean admitting that the deal had become something else. Something neither of us had planned for and neither of us knew how to handle. At midnight on the fifth night, I got out of bed. I didn't change out of my

POV: Lena Moretti Julian's timing was perfect. I'll give him that. He waited until the morning after Naomi's warning, when I was still processing the implications of being Ezra's vulnerability, and he detonated a bomb that turned our private war into a public spectacle. I was pouring coffee when Dominic called. Not texted. Called. At 7:14 AM. His voice was tight and controlled in the way it got when something had gone catastrophically wrong and he was trying to manage it before it became unmanageable. "Turn on the news," he said. "Any channel." I grabbed the remote. Channel four. A morning anchor with a serious face was talking over footage that made my coffee cup freeze halfway to my mouth. Security camera images from The Obsidian's lobby. Me walking through the entrance with Naomi flanking me. Me entering the elevator with a security escort. Me at a gala, Ezra's hand tight on my waist. Each image carefully selected, cropped, and sequenced to tell a very specific story. A woman u