Alle Kapitel von Reborn as the True Billionaire : Kapitel 111 – Kapitel 120

Xavier’s POVThe warrant came on a Wednesday morning. With two federal agents at the door of the Brooklyn apartment at 7 AM with the particular quiet efficiency of people who’d done this enough times to understand that restraint was more effective than force.Xavier had been awake already. He’d been awake since four because sleep had become something that happened to other people over the last three weeks. He was sitting at the small table with coffee he’d made himself and his phone face down in front of him and the whiteboard on the wall behind him still covered in a plan that had stopped being relevant approximately ten days ago.He heard the knock and understood immediately what it was. Because he’d been waiting for it. That was the thing nobody understood about Xavier Lancaster. He always knew when something was coming. He’d built his entire career on anticipating movements before they happened. He’d seen Morana’s return coming six months before she walked into that gala. He’d s

Morana’s POVI want it on record that I said no to the farm. Repeatedly with reasons. Documented reasons that I had laid out clearly over dinner three weeks ago when Tristan had looked at real estate listings in upstate New York with the energy he usually reserved for pharmaceutical acquisitions. I told him that I was a PhD with a company to run and had no opinions about soil. He bought it anyway.Not a huge farm. That was apparently his argument for why this was reasonable. Just land like a house. Some chickens that came with the property because the previous owners had left them and Tristan had called this a bonus feature like chickens were something a person wanted to inherit.We drove up on a Saturday because he said I needed air. I said Manhattan had air and he said not this kind. I said that was extremely pretentious and got in the car.The property was beautiful. I was not going to tell him that immediately but it was. Rolling land and old trees and a house that had been built

Morana’s POVThe text came through at 11pm from a number I didn’t recognize.“I need to see you. Alone. It’s about your mother.”I stared at it for a long moment sitting on the couch with my laptop still open to a board report I’d stopped reading twenty minutes ago. My thumb hovered over the delete option. This was exactly the kind of message that could be a trap, could be Iris fishing for something, could be nothing at all.I almost deleted it. Then I read it again. About your mother. Nobody outside my immediate circle knew Mira existed. We’d kept it contained deliberately, Felix and Theodore and the small legal team handling the facility paperwork. If Iris knew, it meant either she’d had access to something we didn’t know about or Xavier had told her before everything collapsed. Either way I needed to know which.I showed Tristan the phone. He read it once, jaw setting in that particular way and reached for his own phone before he’d even set mine back down.“I’ll have Reid pull a t

MoranaWe went through the drive together at the kitchen island, the laptop between us and the city dark outside the windows and by the third file I understood that whatever I’d braced myself for wasn’t close to enough.The consent forms were the worst part. Not because they were absent, but because they existed, carefully worded documents that used phrases like experimental compassionate protocol and terminal patient participation program while burying the actual substance of what patients were agreeing to somewhere in paragraph nine of a document most of them were too sick to read carefully.Eleven patients. All terminal. All told they were receiving an experimental treatment that might extend their lives. None of them told the treatment was derived from research into my mother’s biology, continued years after my father had supposedly ordered it destroyed.Four of them died within weeks of treatment. The files didn’t specify whether the treatment killed them faster or simply failed

Morana’s POVThe courtroom was fuller than the arraignment had been, every seat in the gallery occupied and a line of press credentials stretched down the hallway outside. Sentencing day had a different weight than everything that came before it. Arraignments were procedural. Sentencing was an ending.I wore navy this time instead of black, something Catherine had chosen for me specifically because she said black read as performance and navy read as certainty and certainty was what I needed the room to feel when I stood to speak.Tristan sat directly behind me in the gallery, close enough that I could feel his presence without needing to turn around and confirm it. Theodore was beside him. Felix on the other side, uncharacteristically quiet, his usual commentary absent in a way that told me even he understood the weight of what this particular morning required.Iris was three rows back. I hadn’t expected her. She’d flown back voluntarily to face her own charges and I understood from m