บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Stolen Bride: บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

POV: Lena Moretti Victor requested the meeting through Dominic. Not through lawyers. Not through intermediaries. He called Dominic's personal phone and said, "I want to see my son. Alone. One hour." Dominic relayed the message to Ezra, who said yes before Dominic finished the sentence. Dominic argued against it. Naomi argued against it. I didn't argue because I knew the look on Ezra's face. He'd been waiting nine years for this conversation. Nobody was going to talk him out of it. What I did argue about was my role. Ezra wanted me nowhere near the meeting. "Victor is unpredictable. I don't want you in the room or adjacent to it." I told him that was unacceptable. We compromised. I would watch from the security center through the camera feed. Close enough to monitor. Far enough to stay safe. Ezra agreed because the alternative was me showing up uninvited, which we both knew I was capable of doing. The meeting was set for three o'clock at The Obsidian. A conference room on the twenti

POV: Lena Moretti We stopped talking. Not a dramatic declaration or a slammed door. Just a gradual withdrawal, like two people stepping back from a ledge they'd been standing on together. He went to his room. I went to mine. The doors closed at the same time, the way they had at the retreat, except this time nobody was breathing hard on the other side. This time there was just silence. The real kind. The empty kind. Day one was almost manageable. We'd gone days without speaking before, early in the marriage, when we were still strangers operating under contract terms. But that silence had been neutral. Comfortable, even. Two people who didn't know each other well enough to miss each other. This was different. This silence had a shape. It was the shape of every conversation we'd had, every argument, every kiss, every whispered confession in the dark. All of it present in the space between us. All of it hurting. He left for Blackthorn at seven. I stayed at The Obsidian and worked on

POV: Lena MorettiI buried the pregnancy the way I buried everything that was too big to process. Under work. Under numbers. Under the precise, controlled focus of a woman who had learned that falling apart was a luxury she couldn't afford. The test was hidden in the lining of my suitcase next to the encrypted drive. Naomi had arranged a discreet doctor's appointment for the following week. Until then, it was just information. Data stored in a compartment I could close when I needed to function.And I needed to function. Because Ezra was preparing the next strike against Crane Industries and he needed me at the table.The balcony conversation had shifted something between us. Not back to where we were. Somewhere new. An uneasy truce built on honesty rather than pretense. We weren't sleeping together. We weren't avoiding each other. We were operating in the space between those two extremes, the professional middle ground where two people who knew too much about each other tried to work

POV: Lena MorettiThe arbitration hearing was on a Wednesday. A private proceeding in a windowless conference room with a panel of three arbitrators, two Crane Industries lawyers, and me. Ezra wasn't allowed in the room. Dominic sat behind me as legal counsel but couldn't speak during my testimony. It was just me and my documents and three strangers who would decide whether the compliance violations I'd uncovered were sufficient to trigger regulatory intervention.I spoke for four hours. No notes. I'd memorized the data because reading from papers makes you look uncertain and uncertainty is death in an arbitration setting. I walked the panel through twelve quarters of Crane Capital's financial disclosures, pointing out the systematic gap between reported risk allocations and actual fee revenue. I showed them the mathematical impossibility of generating Crane Capital's fee income from a conservative portfolio strategy. I showed them the specific quarters where the discrepancy widened,

POV: Lena Moretti I couldn't sleep. My mind wouldn't stop running. The autopsy report. The hesitation. My mother's bruised wrists described in medical terminology on a screen I couldn't stop seeing when I closed my eyes. I lay in bed for two hours and achieved nothing except making the sheets a mess. At three in the morning I got up and did what I always do when I can't control my thoughts. I went back to the documents. Not the autopsy. Not the blood debt contracts. The marriage certificate. The one I'd signed in Ezra's study the night of the rehearsal dinner with shaking hands and a bleeding scalp and the desperate certainty that any door was better than the one Julian had locked behind me. I'd read it before. Quickly. In crisis. Scanning for the basics. Names, dates, terms of the arrangement. I hadn't read it the way I read financial documents because it wasn't a financial document. It was a lifeline. You don't scrutinize a lifeline. You grab it. But something had been nagging a