All Chapters of One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

Olivia calls me on a Sunday evening at seven forty-three.She does not call me on Sunday evenings. She texts, she emails, she sends organized summaries of the week ahead with color-coded priority flags that I have told her twice are unnecessary and that I privately rely on completely. She does not call on Sunday evenings unless something has happened that cannot wait until Monday.I answer before the second ring.“I need to tell you something,” she says. “And I need to tell you before I tell anyone else because I am not certain what to do with it and you are the person I trust to tell me.”“Tell me,” I say.She is quiet for a moment. The particular quiet of someone assembling something they have been sitting with for longer than the phone call.“Adrian Vaughn,” she says.I go still.Adrian Vaughn. Gabriel Kane’s operative planted inside Blackwood Holdings. The name that surfaced in Daniel’s perimeter work weeks ago, a junior analyst whose hire predated the Nathan Sterling recruitment

The first shareholder is a man named Gerald Foss.Not the Gerald Foss from the board, though they share a last name and a general disposition toward bluntness, which I suspect is not coincidental. This Gerald is sixty-three, self-made in the particular way of men who built something from a specific expertise rather than inherited position, and he has held a stake in Blackwood Holdings for nine years, which means he bought in during the recovery period when the company was still finding its footing and chose to stay through everything since.He agrees to meet me at his office in Midtown at eight in the morning, which tells me two things. He wakes early and he takes the meeting seriously enough to give it the best part of his day.I arrive without Ethan and without Marcus and without a security detail beyond the one Daniel insists on and that I have stopped arguing about. I bring the audit, Isabella’s cooperation summary, the evidence against Gabriel, and myself, which is the part I hav

Emma comes for dinner.This was not planned as a significant event. Isabella texted in the afternoon to say she had a work conflict, the architecture firm she started at three weeks ago has a deadline, and could someone take Emma for the evening, and Lucian said yes before I finished reading the message over his shoulder.Emma arrives at six with her school bag and her astronomy notebook and the particular composed expression she brings to unexpected changes in her schedule, which is different from her regular Saturday expression in a subtle way I have learned to read. The regular expression is settled. The unexpected-schedule expression is settled but watchful, monitoring for the thing that might explain the change.I tell her Isabella has a work deadline.The watchfulness recedes. Work she understands. Work is a legitimate reason for things to shift.She puts her bag in the study and comes back to the kitchen and looks at the activity around her, Lucian on the phone with Julian in t

The Blackwood Holdings shareholder meeting opens at nine.The room is the main conference hall on the thirty-eighth floor, the one used for annual general meetings and significant board presentations, with a long table at the front and tiered seating behind it and floor-to-ceiling windows along the east wall that fill the room with the particular flat brightness of a winter morning that has decided to be clear.I have been in this room before. I presented acquisition strategy here eight months ago, before any of this started, before Isabella walked through the lobby doors, before Emma and the metal box and the rain outside an apartment building in the West Thirties. The room looked the same then. The same windows, the same tiered seating, the same long table at the front.It feels completely different now.Gabriel Kane’s faction arrives first. Six people, all of them in suits that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, arranging themselves on the left side of the room with the coo

Julian Blackwood at a podium is a specific and particular thing.He has the same physical presence as Lucian, the same height and the same quality of attention that fills a room, but where Lucian’s presence is contained and deliberate, Julian’s is expansive and easy, the presence of someone who has never found a room he was not comfortable in and has decided that comfort is a strategic advantage rather than a liability.He smiles at the room like a man who has genuinely good news to share and cannot wait to share it.“My name is Julian Blackwood,” he says. “For those of you who don’t know me, I am Lucian’s younger brother, I sit on the board in a non-executive capacity, and I have spent the past six weeks doing something I found genuinely enjoyable.” He pauses. “I have been tracing money.”The room does not know whether to be relieved or alarmed. Julian’s smile suggests both are appropriate.“Mr. Kane presented himself to this room as a concerned shareholder,” Julian says. “A signific