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Home / Romance / The Billionaire’s Favorite Mistake / Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Favorite Mistake: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

59 Chapters

Chapter 11

The phone on the glass desk remained face down, but the silence it left behind felt heavy, almost physical. Marcus had hung up three minutes ago. Neither of them had moved. Ellie kept her hands flat against the fabric of her skirt, focusing on the slight texture beneath her palms. Across the room, Damien stood near the window, though he wasn't looking outside. His fingers brushed against the edge of his desk, tapping a rhythm that didn't quite land. "You think I recorded you," Ellie said. It wasn't a question, but her voice sounded thin in the high-ceilinged room. Damien turned his head toward her, his gaze dropping to the floor between them before meeting hers. "No." "Then tell me how your voice ended up on every news channel." "If I knew that," Damien said, looking down at the dead phone, "Marcus wouldn't have called." The admission hung between them, raw and ugly. He didn't offer a grand explanation. He didn't pace or spin a theory. He simply stood there, looking entirely out

Chapter 12

The glowing text on the tablet screen didn't change, no matter how long Damien stared at it. The digital imprint was clear. The audio file containing their private conversation had been sent to the media networks from the encrypted server inside the Arthur Calder estate. "It's a mistake," Ellie said, her voice cutting through the hum of the apartment's air conditioning. "It has to be. My grandfather has been in Chicago for his medical treatments for the past three weeks. He wasn't even in the state when that audio was recorded, let alone sitting in his study uploading files." Damien didn't look up from the screen. His thumb scrolled slowly through the string of metadata Marcus had brought. "The upload location isn't a mistake, Ellie. IP addresses don't have a personal grudge." "Then someone broke into his house," she insisted, taking a step toward the kitchen island. "Someone used his private network." "Or," Marcus intervened quietly, his hand resting on the edge of the tablet, "th

Chapter 13

The white shirt was too big, but it was the only thing that felt safe. I sat on the edge of the large bed, my fingers blindly tracing the edge of the leather folder I had hidden away in the bottom drawer. The paper inside felt like a brand on my palms. Six days before Damien cornered me in his office with that marriage contract, his grandfather had sat across from me in a tea room downtown, his old, veiny hands pushing that exact sheet of paper across the table. "Sign it, Ellie," the old man had whispered, his voice thin but sharp enough to cut. "Your father's debts vanish. Damien's board will never look into the missing customs declarations. All you have to do is make sure Damien is too distracted to fight the probate restructuring this month." I hadn't given the old man the voice recording. I didn't even know it existed until it played on the morning news. But the signature on that paper was mine. If Damien found it, if he saw the date, he wouldn't see a woman desperately trying t

Chapter 14

Victoria Sterling's house sat at the end of a long gravel drive, upstate, surrounded by trees that had already started turning. She met them at the door herself, silver-haired, sharp-eyed, wearing the particular composure of a woman who'd spent decades learning not to react. Until she saw the photograph in Damien's hand. It happened fast, a flicker, gone almost before it registered, but Ellie had spent enough of the last two weeks studying Damien's face to recognize the same kind of flinch when it crossed someone else's. "Where did you get that?" Victoria asked. "It arrived anonymously," Damien said. "My father, and a man I'm told worked for him for fifteen years. Julian Vance." Victoria's hand tightened on the doorframe. "You should leave." "Not until you tell me what you know." "I know nothing worth risking my life over." She started to close the door, and Ellie stepped forward before she could think better of it. "Someone leaked our marriage recording," Ellie said. "Someone'

Chapter 15

The family archive room hadn't been opened in years, Damien admitted as much while breaking the lock on a storage unit two floors below Sterling Industries, dust thick enough to taste. "Nobody comes down here?" Ellie asked. "There was never a reason to." He pulled the first box down, coughing at the dust it kicked up. "My father digitized what he wanted kept. Everything else got boxed and forgotten." They worked through the boxes for over an hour, mostly old contracts and outdated stationery, the air thick with the particular staleness of paper that hadn't been touched in a decade, until Ellie's hands closed around a leather photo album, corners worn soft with age. "Damien." She set it on the table between them, flipping it open to the first page, his father, younger, flanked by a group of executives at some long-ago company function. "Look." He leaned over her shoulder, and she watched him go very still. "That's Julian," he said, pointing to a tall man near the edge of the group

Chapter 16

The second confidence vote came faster than Damien expected, called on just forty-eight hours' notice, leaving almost no room to prepare. The timing had Whitfield written all over it. Ellie watched him fight his own tie in the bedroom mirror, his hands not quite steady enough to make the knot sit straight. "They're trying to catch you off balance," she said. "After the recording. After the headlines. They think you're weak right now." "I am weak right now." He didn't flinch saying it. Just stated it, like a fact on a balance sheet. "Which is exactly why I can't walk in there looking like it." She crossed to him before she'd decided to, her fingers replacing his on the knot. He went still. "For what it's worth," she said, not looking up, "I don't think you're weak. I think you're carrying more than one person should have to." Something moved behind his eyes. Surprise, maybe. Or just the discomfort of being seen accurately by someone he'd spent years keeping at a distance. "Come w

Chapter 17

"The badge," Damien said, the moment they were alone in the elevator. "Robert Chen's badge. The one accessing sealed files under a dead man's credentials." "Katherine knows something about it." "Katherine knows something about everything, apparently, and keeps handing us pieces one at a time instead of the whole picture." Frustration edged into his voice, sharper than she'd heard from him before. "I need to talk to her directly. Not through intermediaries." "She's been careful for a reason, Damien. Whoever's behind this cut the power on an entire block within twenty minutes of us sitting down with her." "Then we'll be careful too." They didn't get the chance that night. When they returned to the penthouse, exhausted and still turning the badge revelation over in their minds, Ellie noticed it first, the hallway closet, slightly ajar, when she was certain she'd closed it that morning. "Damien." He followed her gaze, and his expression shifted instantly into something alert, focuse

Chapter 18

Arthur opened the door before they'd even reached the porch, like he'd been watching from the window and waiting. "Ellie." His eyes went to Damien, wary. "What's this about?" "A phone number," Damien said, no preamble. "Unlisted. You called it three days before the wedding." Arthur's face didn't change, but his hand tightened on the doorframe, the same thing Ellie recognized from a dozen childhood arguments, the one that meant he was deciding how much of the truth he could survive telling. "Come in," he said finally. They sat in the same study where Ellie had confronted him about the fraud charges weeks earlier, and this time it was Damien who spoke first. "Arthur. Did you know Julian Vance." The name landed like a blow. Arthur's glass, empty this time, Ellie noticed, nearly slipped from his hand. He caught it against his knee before it fell, and for a moment he just sat there, staring at his own fingers around the glass as though they belonged to someone else. Ellie had seen he

Chapter 19

Damien didn't come home that night. Or the next. Ellie texted twice. Called once. Watched the screen for the three dots that meant he was typing something back, and got nothing, not even the courtesy of silence with an explanation attached. Just absence. It settled into her chest differently than the headlines had, differently than the leaked recording or the anonymous threats. Those had come from outside, from an enemy she couldn't name. This one had a name. This one had walked out the door on his own two feet. She spent the second night at her father's house, because the penthouse without him in it felt less quiet and more like being left somewhere. "He'll come around," Arthur said, not quite meeting her eyes. "You don't know him well enough to say that." "No." He set his glass down, guilt still radiating off him in waves he hadn't figured out how to hide. "I don't. I'm sorry, El. For all of it." She didn't have the energy to comfort him. Not with Damien's voice still looping

Chapter 20

Damien didn't answer the message's accusation right away. He read it twice, color draining from his face, then a third time, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less true if he looked long enough. When he finally spoke, his voice had none of its usual precision. "I was in Geneva," he said. "The night my father died. A conference. I have the flight records and hotel receipts. I flew back the next morning when Marcus called me." "I believe you," Ellie said. "Someone doesn't." He set the phone down carefully, like it might detonate. "Someone's building a case that puts me in that office the night he died. That's not a rumor anymore. That's a plan." Before she could respond, her own phone rang. Her father, voice tight in a way that made her stomach drop before he'd said a single word. "Ellie. I need you to come to the house. Now. Alone, if you can manage it." "Dad, what's wrong." "Please." The word cracked in the middle. "I have to tell you something, and I need

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