All Chapters of Reborn as the True Billionaire : Chapter 71 - Chapter 78

Morana’s POVFelix lived in a brownstone in the West Village. It smells like coffee and old books and the comfortable disorder of someone who spent most of their time working and very little time caring about aesthetics. There were documents on every surface. Empty mugs that had been there long enough to leave rings on the wood. A whiteboard on one wall covered in names and dates and arrows connecting things that probably made sense to him.He opened the door when he saw me through the peephole and stepped aside without asking questions. That was Felix. He always knew when questions were the wrong thing.I came in and sat on his couch and he went to the kitchen and came back with tea I hadn’t asked for and sat in the chair across from me and waited.“I had a fight with Tristan.” I kinda sound ridiculous saying it but it’s the truth.“I know. He called me.”I looked up in surprise, my heart pounding for some ODD reason. “He called you?”“Three minutes ago.” Felix wrapped both hands ar

Tristan’s POVFelix lived four blocks from the nearest subway station which meant I walked past three coffee shops and a farmer’s market and approximately forty people who recognized me and didn’t say anything because New Yorkers have the decency of pretending not to notice things.I cancelled the suppression order from the car. Twelve minutes after she’d left. Reid called it premature. I told him to file an interview request with two major publications instead and he’s gone quiet. He recalculating everything he thought he understood about me.The brownstone was exactly the kind of building Felix Mortaine would live in. The place suggested the person inside has enough money to live anywhere and has chosen this specifically because they actually liked it.I knocked once. Felix opened the door and looked at me for a long moment with an expression that communicated several things at once. That he’z been expecting me. He wasn’t entirely sure I deserved to be let in. And he was going to l

Morana’s POVThe drive to Connecticut took ninety minutes and Tristan drove himself which surprised me. No driver or Reid in the passenger seat feeding him intelligence updates. Just him behind the wheel of the Aston Martin in a dark coat with his jaw set and his eyes on the road.I sat in the passenger seat with Felix’s documents in my lap and tried to read them but kept looking at his hands instead. The way they held the wheel. Loose but controlled. Everything about Tristan Rothschild was loose but controlled and I’d spent enough time studying him now to understand that the looseness was the more dangerous part.We’d been on the road for twenty minutes before either of us said anything.“Reid found him through a research grant,” Tristan said, eye still forward. “Filed under a different name but the contact chain led back to a PO box in Westport. From there it was just property records.”“How long has Xavier been meeting with him?”“Three weeks minimum. Possibly longer.” He changed

Morana’s POVDr. Clive Wilder talked for a long time and I let him. I didn’t interrupt or ask questions. Interrupting felt wrong like stopping someone mid-confession after they’d been carrying it for thirty years.He told me about my mother. The way you talked about things that broke you permanently. Mira Mortaine. MCRF at three times what I currently produce. Her body generated the compound with an efficiency that made everything Xavier extracted from me look like the rough draft it actually was.My father found her through a private medical network. Some cardiologist who noticed anomalous healing markers in a patient and didn’t know what to do with them. Ivo Mortaine knew exactly what to do with them.He spent eighteen months studying her blood before he asked her to dinner. Romantic huh. “She knew he was a researcher” Dr. Wilder said to his coffee cup. “She knew he was interested in her biology. She wasn’t naive. But she believed the interest had become secondary to the love. I th