All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

84 Chapters

Chapter Thirty-One: The Morning the World Found Out

We got home just after midnight.Ethan made tea while I took off my heels at the door and sat on the kitchen floor for a moment, back against the cabinet, just sitting, letting the night decompress around me. The gala. Beatrice's fractured face. Vanessa leaving early in her red dress. Damien at the bar not moving for the better part of an hour. All of it settling now into something quieter, the way things settle when you have been holding yourself together in a room for hours and finally have permission to let the room go.Ethan set a mug on the floor beside me and sat next to me against the cabinet without comment. The kitchen warm around us. The city outside doing what it always did."How do you feel?" he said eventually.I thought about it honestly. "Like something just ended," I said. "And something else is about to begin."He nodded. He understood without needing more than that.I slept well. Better than I had in months.Three days later the merger completion was filed publicly.

Chapter Thirty-Two: The Woman Who Couldn't Stay Quiet

The week after the merger went public was the most interesting week I had experienced in years.Not because of anything I did. I went to work. I approved campaigns. I sat in three board meetings and one strategy session and a mentorship call with a young founder from Atlanta who reminded me of myself five years ago in a way that made me want to give her everything I wished someone had given me. I picked Noah up from school every day. I cooked dinner most evenings. I went to sleep at a reasonable hour and woke up the next morning and did it again.The interesting part was watching what everyone else did.The financial press was largely respectful, some of it genuinely admiring. Two major publications ran long analytical pieces on the acquisition strategy and both of them used the word masterclass at least once. The business community was fascinated in the specific way it is fascinated by a story it did not see coming, which meant the story had legs and the coverage kept building on its

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Interview They Thought She’d Never Give

By the third day the internet had decided it had a mystery to solve.Vanessa had not named Ethan directly in her interview. She had been too careful for that.The internet, which had an extraordinary appetite for filling in blanks, had taken that pause and run an entire investigation through it.Within forty-eight hours of Vanessa's interview airing, three separate accounts had published threads identifying Ethan Vale as the most likely candidate for the unnamed powerful investor behind Amelia Carter's acquisition. They had connected the dots with the specific enthusiastic inaccuracy of people who had found a narrative they liked and were fitting facts around it rather than the other way around. Vale Enterprises. The early stage investment in Lumière five years ago. The gala photographs where Ethan appeared beside me. The way his name kept turning up in the margins of my public story without ever being centered in it.By the fourth day it was not speculation anymore. A financial journa

Chapter Thirty-Four: The Chapter She Already Closed.

The week had been full since the Claire Mensah piece settled. Olivia managing the incoming requests, the board member conversations still being scheduled, the Lumière Paris approvals still moving through their final stages. By Thursday morning the noise from Vanessa's failed interview and the blogs that had turned on her was still rippling through comment sections and publications but it had moved from something requiring my attention to something simply existing in the background, like weather that has passed but left the air changed.The Harrington anniversary event was on a Thursday evening.I was glad for the event. Not because I needed the distraction but because James Harrington was someone worth being in a room with and the Harrington Group's thirtieth anniversary was a legitimate milestone that Lumière's co-sponsorship of deserved my actual presence rather than a representative.Ethan had a board commitment he could not move.He told me on the Tuesday before the Harrington ann

Chapter Thirty-Five: The Man Who Changed Everything

The morning after the Harrington event I woke up early.Not from restlessness. Not from the residue of the evening or anything Damien had said standing at those windows or any of the complicated feelings I might have expected to carry home from a room that had contained that much history. I woke up early because I always woke up early and because my body had long since stopped treating difficult evenings as reasons to lose sleep.I made coffee. Stood at the window. Watched the city come awake the way it always did, floor by floor, light by light, without asking anyone's permission.Then I went to work.The week moved the way weeks moved when Lumière had momentum behind it, which it did now, more than it ever had. The Paris approval documents. Three supplier calls. A mentorship session with a founder from Atlanta who reminded me of myself five years ago in a way that made me want to give her everything I wished someone had given me. Noah's football practice on the Wednesday. Ethan at t

Chapter Thirty-six: Ella's First Signs

(Damien's POV)The morning meeting started at nine.Post-merger restructuring review, a full board session that I had been preparing for since Tuesday, numbers and projections and the careful optimistic language of a company trying to convince itself and its investors that the worst was behind it. I sat at the head of that table and I managed the room and I said the right things in the right order and nobody looking at me would have known that I had slept three hours and that the back of my mind was somewhere else entirely.Nathan knew. He always knew. He sat to my left and said nothing about it and that was its own kind of mercy.We were forty minutes in when my phone vibrated on the table.I always kept it face-down in meetings. Always. It was a rule I had kept without exception for years.I turned it over.Vanessa.I stared at her name for two seconds. Something moved through me that I cannot fully explain, something instinctive and immediate, my body registering something before m

Chapter Thirty-seven: What the Doctors Couldn't Explain

Dr. Reyes sat across from me with a folder open on the desk and the careful expression of someone who had rehearsed what she was about to say and was still measuring exactly how to deliver it. She was young, younger than I expected, with steady eyes that told me she had sat in this chair and delivered difficult news before and had learned how to hold the room while she did it.I sat forward. Both feet on the floor. Hands on my knees."How is she," I said. First. Before anything else. "Is Ella alright.""Ella is stable," she said. "She is resting and she is not in any immediate danger. I want you to know that before I say anything else."Something in my chest released just enough to let me breathe properly."But," I said."But her bloodwork has returned results that concern us. Her blood panel flagged an irregularity that affects her red blood cells. It is manageable and treatable but the treatment requires a compatible blood transfusion." She paused. "Ideally from a biological parent.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Test That Shattered a Lie

She closed the door behind us.Same small office. Same window looking out onto nothing. Same two chairs and the desk between us. But the room felt different this time. Smaller somehow. The walls closer than they had been an hour ago when I had sat here and volunteered my blood without hesitation and walked back out into that corridor as a father who was about to help his daughter.I sat down.Dr. Reyes sat across from me. She did not open a folder this time. She folded her hands on the desk and looked at me and I saw it immediately, before she said a single word. The particular quality of her expression. The way a person looks when they are carrying something they did not ask to carry and are about to place it in front of someone else because there is no other option.I had been in enough difficult conversations in my professional life to recognise that look.I had never had it aimed at me personally before."Mr. Sinclair," she said. "The preliminary compatibility results have come ba

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Vanessa When the Walls Close In

I found Vanessa in the family waiting room at the end of the corridor.She heard me come in.She did not turn around immediately. She sat for a moment with her back to me and I watched her shoulders do something, a small involuntary movement, the specific adjustment of a person who knows what is coming and is trying to find somewhere inside themselves to put it before it arrives.Then she turned.She looked at my face.And I watched her understand.Not partially. Not with the managed uncertainty of someone who suspects but can still maintain the performance of not knowing. Completely. The full and total understanding of a woman who has been waiting for this moment for seven years and has never fully believed it would not come and is now sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital waiting room watching it arrive."Damien," she said.I sat down across from her. I did not speak immediately. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the folded results and placed them on the chair between

Chapter Forty: Everything Damien's Empire Actually Cost Him

I drove home from the hospital faster than I should have.Not recklessly. Just with the specific urgency of a man whose body needed to be moving because stopping meant feeling everything that was sitting in his chest and he was not ready for that yet. The city moved past the windows in the way it always moved at that hour, indifferent and loud and entirely unconcerned with what had just happened inside a small waiting room on the fourth floor of a building I had left behind me.I got home. Took off my jacket. Sat on the edge of my bed.I did not sleep.I tried. I lay in the dark with the results still in my jacket pocket hanging over the chair and I stared at the ceiling and I told myself to close my eyes. My body ignored me completely. My mind would not stop. It kept going back to the hospital corridor and the small waiting room and Vanessa's hands over her mouth and Lucas Moretti's name coming out from behind them and the one step back and then the car park and Ella's photograph and

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