CONTRACT ENGAGEMENT: Unexpected Heir のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 7

MAYAMy father never called me directly. That was simply how Richard Vance operated.He had assistants for communication and lawyers for anything complicated and carefully worded emails for everything in between. He had called me personally three times in my life. When my mother died. When I got into Upton. When our CFO was arrested and the story was about to break publicly and he needed me to hear it from him first.Five missed calls in four minutes meant I did not have a category for what was happening.I called him back from the corridor, the news alert still folded in my hand.He picked up before the first ring finished. "Maya. Where are you.""Campus. I just saw the alert." I kept my voice level. "Talk to me.""Someone forged communications between our firms." His voice was in the controlled register, the one he used when something very large was being held at a careful distance. "Coordinated trading on three stock positions over eighteen months. The evidence is detailed and conv

MAYAI did not tell Liam about the text that night.Not because I was hiding it, but Because I wanted twenty four hours to think about what it meant before I handed it to someone else to think about, and that was a habit I had built so deep into myself that I did not even question it anymore. I processed first. I shared second. It had kept me functional through things that should have broken me and I was not about to change it because of a four word text from an unknown number.I forwarded the screenshot to my own email, saved the number twice, and went to dinner with Priya.She talked about her comparative literature seminar and a boy in her economics lecture who kept borrowing her pen and never returning it and whether that was a personality flaw or a flirting strategy. I ate my food and responded at the right moments and let her voice fill the space where my thoughts were running underneath, and by the time we walked back to the dorm I had a cleaner picture of the situation.Someon

MAYAI showed him the photo in the elevator on the way up to his apartment.Not because I had planned to go to his apartment. He had seen my face when I looked at my phone in the car and he had said quietly, "My place. We deal with it tonight," and I had not argued because the alternative was going back to my dorm room alone with a photo taken by someone standing in the dark outside a venue and that was not a version of the evening I wanted.Priya was at a late study session. I texted her that I was fine and would explain tomorrow. She sent back a single question mark and then nothing further, which was Priya's way of saying she was holding her questions but not indefinitely.Liam's apartment was on the fourth floor of a building two blocks from the east edge of campus. I had built a picture of it in my head from the general idea of him and I had been wrong. No performance of wealth. No deliberate architecture of impression. Just a clean organized space with things in it that looked c