Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 31 - Chapitre 40

Sophie’s POVA brief pause. Just a fraction of a second. "I was told Mr. Callahan, ma'am. I wasn't given a first name."I looked at him for a moment. He held my gaze with the polished neutrality of someone who genuinely didn't know or genuinely wasn't going to say, and I couldn't tell which.I nodded. "Thank you," I said again, and followed him out.The hotel was the kind that didn't need to announce itself.No signs. No fanfare. Just a building in the center of the city that had been beautiful for a hundred years and knew it, fronted by a long approach of pale stone and low lighting and the kind of quiet that expensive places cultivated deliberately, the silence of somewhere that had decided long ago that the people who were meant to be here would know it and the people who weren't would feel it in their bones and turn back.I did not turn back.The driver opened my door and I stepped out onto the stone and the cold night air moved against my bare shoulder and I stood up straight the

Sophie’s POVI kept my eyes on the room in front of me and I did not move and I listened.Two men. From what I could gather through the foliage without turning around, they were shareholders — they referenced the board twice, the quarterly report once, and each other by names I stored carefully as I heard them. They were speaking with the easy confidence of people who had been having this particular category of conversation for a long time and considered it entirely routine.They were talking about stock manipulation.Not in those words. They never used those words. But the architecture of what they were describing was clear enough — a coordinated plan to drive Callahan Industries' stock price down at a specific moment, to benefit from the drop, to time it around the transition of leadership. Around Ares.My champagne glass was very still in my hand. My face was very still. My entire body was operating on a kind of controlled quiet that I was dimly impressed by, because internally som

Sophie’s POVI told myself I was being practical. I told myself this could not wait until morning, because morning would mean breakfast, and breakfast would mean Shirley and Lana and Derek, and there was no version of telling Ares what I had heard that survived a single witness. I told myself it was simply the only available option.I told myself all of this very carefully while I got out of bed and put on my robe and tied the belt firmly and stepped into my slippers.Then I left my room.The mansion at night was a different building than the one I lived in during the day. Dimmer. Quieter. The long hallways stretched out under the soft glow of the wall sconces and the only sounds were my own footsteps on the carpet and the distant tick of a clock somewhere downstairs. I made it to the main staircase before I realized I had absolutely no idea where Ares's room was.I had been in this house for two years and I had never been in the east wing. Shirley had made the boundaries clear early

Sophie’s POVFor a moment he didn't say anything. He just looked at me, and the expression on his face had changed into something I hadn't seen on it before — something underneath the cold focus, layered into it. Admiration. Real and unguarded and direct, the look of a man who had just watched someone do something that genuinely impressed him and saw no reason to hide that it had."You recorded the whole thing," he said."Yes.""Standing three feet away from them. While they were in the middle of it.""They never looked at me." I said it simply, because it was simply true. "Nobody looks at me. I've had two years of practice at being someone people talk in front of."Something flickered in his eyes at that. Something that wasn't admiration anymore — something darker and quieter that moved through and was gone."I'll find out who they are," he said. His voice had dropped into a register I had heard from him only once or twice — that low, dangerous evenness, the sound of a man making a d

Sophie’s POVThe thought surfaced through the heat with a kind of desperate clarity. I needed to leave this room right now, because every second I stayed was a second the warmth got harder to think through, and if I stayed much longer I was going to do something genuinely insane. Something I could not take back. Something that the part of me still capable of reason knew, with total certainty, would change everything in a way I was not ready for and did not have time for and could not afford.I had three months. I had a divorce to sign and a diagnosis sitting in my chest like a stone that nobody in this house knew about.I could not do this.I made myself breathe.Ares must have felt the shift in me — that small return of resistance, the catch of self-preservation — because he leaned away.Not abruptly. Not with any offense. Just slowly, easing the distance back open between us, giving me back the space I had asked for earlier and that he had so deliberately closed. He straightened to