All Chapters of Reborn as the True Billionaire : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

MoranaThe dress I decided to wear was Valentino. Midnight blue silk that moved when I moved and caught light when I didn’t. My hair was up, diamond earrings from the Mortaine vault that I’d been wearing to everything lately because they made me feel like my father was watching approvingly and occasionally I needed that.Tristan was in the car when I came downstairs. Dark suit without a tie. The version of him that understood formal events well enough to understate them deliberately. He looked at me when I got in then turned back to his phone.“You look like you’re going to acquire something,” he said without glancing up.“I am,” I said. “The room.”The gala was at the Plaza. Pharmaceutical money always ended up at the Plaza eventually. The kind of event that had mattered before I disappeared and mattered differently now that I was back. Every name worth knowing in the industry under one roof and two years ago none of them would have predicted I’d be walking in as CEO of anything.The

Morana’s POVI found the garment bag lying across the bed when I walked into Tristan’s room. It was really not jsut my room anymore. Ours.I stared at it for a moment before looking toward the sitting area where he was finishing a phone call by the windows. His sleeves were rolled neatly to his forearms, one hand tucked into his pocket while the other rested against the glass. The city glowed beyond him, washed in gold by the setting sun.“…move the meeting to Monday.”“No. Tonight belongs to me.”He ended the call before anyone could argue. I raised an eyebrow.“I didn’t know billionaires took evenings off.”“They don’t.”“Then?”“They make exceptions.” He nodded toward the garment bag.“Open it.”I unzipped it carefully.A champagne-colored silk dress slipped into view, the fabric catching the bedroom lights like liquid gold. The neckline was elegant without trying too hard, the waist softly gathered before falling into a flowing skirt with a slit that ended just above my knee.My

Morana’s POVWe ended up on the grass. I don’t know exactly when it happened. One minute we were in the clearing and the next I was sitting between his legs with his chest at my back wurh the fairy lights still doing their thing in the branches above us. The empty wine glasses somewhere behind us on the table.His hands found my hair and it was not intentional at first, just resting. Then I felt him find a pin and remove it carefully and set it aside and find another one. It was a slow deliberate process of taking my hair down while the night sat around us being unreasonably beautiful.“What do you actually want?” he asked. “After all of this.”“To sleep,” I said hiding a yawn. “For an embarrassing amount of time.”“After the sleep.”I thought about it. The honest version not the version I gave journalists or board members or anyone who needed Morana Mortaine the CEO to have a coherent five year plan.“I want Mortaine to be something my father couldn’t have imagined. Not because I wan

Morana’s POVI was looking for a pen because I needed to sign something and mine had run dry. Tristan’s office was closer than the kitchen drawer so I went in and opened the first cabinet. I found highlighters which weren’t helpful and opened the second then found exactly what I was looking for then opened the third one by accident because I was already moving and momentum is a thing.The file was right there. M.M. in his handwriting. The letters were written with the same deliberate precision he put into everything.I picked it up because my name is Morana Mortaine and those are my initials and I’m a curious person by nature and training. I told myself that was the only reason as I opened it and the newspaper clipping on top stared back at me.Me. Twenty-two years old standing at a podium at the pharmaceutical industry emerging researcher awards in a black blazer I still owned somewhere. My PhD was three months old in that photograph. I remember that day clearly because it was the fi

Tristan’s POVI knew the moment I walked in. She was standing at the counter with two cups of tea and her expression was completely neutral and if I didn’t know her face the way I knew it now I would have seen nothing at all. But I did know her face. I’d been studying it for six years in photographs and conference footage and across boardroom tables and kitchen islands. I saw the two seconds where she decided how to play this before she turned around.She turned around with both cups of tea and said: “2017.”And that was the whole thing. Two years of careful management and six years of telling myself a story I knew wasn’t entirely true and it came down to her saying a single year across my own kitchen like a question that was actually an answer.I said yes because what else was there to say?She asked if it was ever about the compound and I told her no and I meant it completely. The compound came later. Xavier came later. The case came later. In the beginning it was just her work la