Semua Bab Reborn as the True Billionaire : Bab 121 - Bab 128

Morana’s POVIris caught me in the corridor outside the courtroom, waiting near the elevators while Tristan spoke with our legal team a few feet away, close enough to notice but far enough to give me space if I wanted it.“Can I have a minut?” I glanced at Tristan. He’d already seen her approach, his attention shifting even mid-conversation and I gave a small shake of my head that meant I was fine, that this didn’t require intervention. He held my gaze a moment longer than necessary before returning to the legal team though I knew he wasn’t actually listening to them anymore.“I don’t have anything to trade this time” Iris said, reading the wariness I hadn’t fully hidden. “No documents. No leverage. I’m cooperating fully with the prosecutors on my own charges. Whatever comes for me now, I’ve already accepted it.”“Then what is this?”She wrapped her arms around herself, the grey coat swallowing her thinner frame and looked genuinely uncertain for the first time since I’d known her.

Morana’s POVDr. Patricia Hale’s office was smaller than I expected, warm in a deliberate way that felt designed to counteract exactly the kind of controlled composure both Tristan and I brought into every room we occupied professionally. Two chairs angled toward each other instead of a couch, which felt oddly more intimate than I’d anticipated.I sat with my hands folded in my lap, aware of exactly how corporate my posture looked and glanced at Tristan beside me, who’d adopted the same careful stillness he brought to board meetings, jaw set, expression unreadable.“Neither of you needs to perform anything here,” Dr. Hale said, watching us both with the particular patience of someone who’d clearly seen this exact tension in every powerful couple who’d ever walked through her door. “This isn’t a negotiation. There’s no outcome you need to secure.”“Old habits,” I said.“Understandably.” She had a legal pad in her lap, though she wasn’t writing yet, just watching us both with an attenti

Morana’s POVDr. Storms ran the Friday board meeting without me for the first time in months. I found out how it went from a text summary Felix sent afterward instead of sitting through it myself and something about that felt like an actual milestone worth acknowledging.She handled the Hendricks acquisition question better than you would have. Don’t tell her I said that. Felix texted.I heard that, came Yemi’s response in the same thread, apparently added by Felix without my knowledge. And thank you, I think.I set the phone down and looked at Tristan across the kitchen island, where he was reading something on his own phone with an expression that suggested Reid had sent something equally reassuring.“Rothschild’s quarterly numbers came in,” he said. “Reid presented them himself. Investors didn’t ask a single question about my absence.”“Should we be offended by that?”“Deeply offended,” he said, not looking up. “Apparently we’re replaceable.”“Apparently we built something that do

Tristan’s POVThe gala has been exactly one year ago tonight. I hadn’t planned anything extravagant. No garden with fairy lights, no private jet, none of the grand gestures I’d apparently developed a habit of over the past months. Just the farmhouse, quiet, the fireplace lit against the early autumn cold and a bottle of wine I’d chosen myself instead of asking Reid to source something impressive.Morana was upstairs changing out of her farm clothes and I stood in the kitchen doing something I hadn’t done in longer than I could accurately remember. Nothing. Just standing there waitin and letting the quiet exist without filling it with a phone call or a report or the next necessary task.A year ago tonight I’d watched her walk into that ballroom in a dress she hadn’t worn in five years and something in me had recognized her before she’d even reached the entrance, some part of my mind that had been cataloging her for six years finally understanding that the distance I’d maintained was ab