Semua Bab Bound by Contract, Owned by Hate: Bab 21 - Bab 30

Chapter 21 (Sophia's POV) The Monday board meeting with Victor was still four days away. Four days of maintaining the performance. Four days of sitting across breakfast from Xander Voss and pretending the fight we'd had hadn't rearranged something fundamental between us. Four days of pretending I didn't notice every time he looked at me. I noticed every time he looked at me. That was the problem stated plainly. Izzy found me staring at a mood board Tuesday afternoon without actually seeing it and pulled up a chair with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd been waiting for this conversation. "Talk," she said simply. "There's nothing to talk about." "You've been rearranging that mood board for forty minutes and you've put the cobalt swatch in the wrong column three times." She crossed her arms. "Talk." I sat back. "He told Victor's office I'd be at Monday's meeting," I said. "Without being asked." Izzy waited. "He acknowledged yesterday morning that he'd withh

Chapter 23 (Sophia's POV) The Paris Fashion Week slot had been confirmed eight months ago. Laurent Luxe's autumn showcase, front row press and forty-two looks. Three years of creative direction finally converging into a single forty-minute presentation that would either cement our position as the most compelling luxury brand of the season or hand our competitors the narrative they'd been waiting for. Nothing was going wrong. Until everything did. It started at six-fifteen in the morning. Izzy called from the venue, a converted nineteenth century gallery in the eighth arrondissement that we'd spent three weeks transforming into exactly the right setting for the collection's visual language. "The lighting rig collapsed," she said. "Back third of the runway. Nobody's hurt but we've lost four of the twelve primary setups and the show is in eleven hours." I was already sitting up in bed. "How bad?" "Bad enough that Sebastian is currently using three different languages

Chapter 25 (Sophia's POV) Paris was beautiful in the morning. I'd forgotten that. Or perhaps I'd never properly noticed, every previous Paris trip had been consumed entirely by work, by collections, by the relentless forward momentum that had defined my life since I was twenty-two and Laurent Luxe was held together by determination and very little else. This morning I noticed. I stood on the hotel balcony with coffee and watched the city wake up slowly, the way cities that understood their own significance always did, unhurried and certain. Last night sat somewhere behind my sternum in a way I wasn't examining directly. Not yet. Izzy found me at breakfast in the hotel restaurant, slid into the chair across from mine and looked at me with the particular expression she reserved for things she'd already concluded and was deciding how to deliver. "The Vogue Paris piece is live," she said, setting her phone on the table. "Julian's interview, the collection coverage is

Chapter 27 (Sophia's POV) I stood at that window for a long time, long enough for the city below to complete its indifferent rotation from late evening into the first quiet hours of night. Long enough for the facts to stop feeling like a shock and start feeling like something I'd have to learn to carry. My mother had not been entirely a victim. She'd been a participant. Whatever Victor had offered or promised, whatever had brought her to that decision, her signature was on the document. Her involvement in the sabotage that had helped hollow out everything Henri built was real and chosen. I thought about the woman I remembered. Elegant, quietly sad in the years after Henri died. Always encouraging me to let Laurent Luxe go. To sell it, to walk away and build something new without the weight of my father's name pulling at everything. I'd thought it was grief talking or the exhaustion of a woman who'd watched her husband die and couldn't bear to watch the company follow. Now

Chapter 29 (Sophia's POV) The reservation was Richard's idea. A strategic public appearance at Eleven Madison Park, intimate enough to photograph well, prestigious enough to generate the right kind of coverage. Two hours of visible marital harmony directly ahead of Monday's board meeting with Victor. That was what I told myself in the car on the way there. Xander was in a dark charcoal suit that fit the way his suits always fit, like the tailor had taken the word 'commanding' as a technical specification. He was reviewing something on his phone when I came out of the bedroom and looked up with the particular attention he'd been giving me lately that I was working very hard not to read into. "You look exceptional," he said simply, without strategy. I looked down at the deep emerald dress Izzy had selected and said nothing. Which was probably its own kind of answer. Dax had the car waiting. The evening was cool and clear, Manhattan doing its best impression of a city tha