All Chapters of Once Discarded, I Married His Dearest Daddy: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Diane smiled, the heavy crystal of her champagne flute catching the fierce afternoon light pouring through the floor-to-ceiling glass. The city below looked like a toy model, a messy arrangement of white stucco villas, winding cliffside roads, and superyachts bobbing on a sea that looked too blue to be real. From up here, the chaos of the morning felt incredibly distant.She took a slow, deliberate sip. The Dom Pérignon was perfectly chilled, a crisp, sharp burn that cut straight through the lingering adrenaline in her veins.Behind her, the office was quiet, save for the faint, rhythmic scratching of Sarah’s stylist pen against her tablet screen. Sarah didn't say anything for a long time. She just stood near the leather sofa, watching her boss’s silhouette against the blinding brightness of the window."The Frankfurt team just confirmed their wire transfer," Sarah said finally, her voice carrying a rare, relaxed lightness. "The initial deposit for the Zeebrugge logistics hub is alr

Sophia’s fingers were shaking so hard she dropped her iPad onto the silk duvet. It was half past two in the morning, but the bedroom in her father’s villa was bright, illuminated by the harsh, blue glow of three different burner phones scattered across the sheets.She had spent forty-eight hours and twenty-two thousand euros buying every mid-tier lifestyle blogger from Menton to Milan.The strategy was messy, born out of pure, frantic spite after the boardroom disaster. If she couldn't break the marriage contract legally, she would make Diane a pariah.The headlines were supposed to go live at dawn.The Secret Past of the Voss Ex-wife.How an Executive Assistant Manipulated an Aging Billionaire.She’d fed the writers old rumors, fabricated quotes from former cleaning staff, anything that would stick."It’s uploading," she muttered into the dark room, her breath hot against the screen of her primary phone. "It’s going to go viral before the morning trading session."Her phone didn't ri

"...And as the Voss Group looks toward this crucial Singapore restructuring, it is the remarkable poise of Diane Voss—seen here at last night's Red Cross Gala—that many credit for restoring absolute confidence to the Mediterranean logistics market after weeks of unprecedented corporate turbulence.” The voice came from the TV presenter. Sophia had left Monaco, and she had no plans on returning until everything had died down. The rain in London didn't fall like it did in Monaco. Down south, a storm was loud, violent, over in an hour, leaving the white stone streets smelling like clean pine and salt. Here, it was just a grey, endless drizzle that seemed to ooze straight out of the old brickwork, turning the pavement into a greasy mirror that reflected nothing but red buses and black umbrellas.Sophia sat on the edge of a deep velvet sofa that smelled faintly of damp and someone else’s lavender perfume. The flat belonged to her father’s holding company, a tall, narrow building in Belg

Inside the master suite of the villa, the air was warm, thick with the scent of burning cedar and the expensive, waxy perfume of the white lilies Diane had placed on the mantelpiece that morning.Damien was sitting on the low leather sofa, his head pushed back into the dark cushions, his eyes closed. He looked tired. Really tired. The skin under his jaw looked a bit loose under the soft amber light of the fire, the lines around his eyes carved deep by twelve hours of dealing with the Frankfurt lawyers and the endless, technical fine print of the Rotterdam migration. His tie was gone, dropped onto the floor by his feet, his white collar unbuttoned so far that you could see the coarse, grey hair at the base of his throat.Diane came out of the adjoining dressing room quietly, her bare feet making absolutely no sound on the Persian rug.She’d changed out of her severe navy corporate dress. Now, she wore a loose, fluid robe of cream silk that pooled around her ankles like spilled milk a

Marcus was waiting for the heavy industrial machine to finish binding the quarterly transit ledgers. The fluorescent light in the fourth-floor copy room had a rhythmic, irritating flicker. It was faint, just enough to make your eyes ache if you stood under the plastic casing for more than five minutes.The plastic rings were clicking into place with a dull, mechanical snap, over and over, while the air around the feeder smelled of hot toner and cheap paper dust. It was a miserable little room. Tucked away behind the emergency exit, far from the windows, a place where people only came to drop off broken cartridges or hide from the floor managers.He was leaning his forearm against the warm metal top of the scanner when he saw it.It was sitting right on the edge of the glass bed, half-hidden by a discarded stack of shipping receipts. A small square of cream-colored silk. It was too soft for this floor, too clean to belong to any of the clerks who spent their days getting black ink u