All Chapters of THE CEO ALREADY KNEW : Chapter 221 - Chapter 230

We woke to the sound of helicopters.Not close—not yet—but close enough. The thrum of rotors echoed off the mountains, bouncing between peaks like a warning. Celeste was already standing at the window, her silhouette sharp against the grey dawn."Hana's outside," she said without turning. "She says they're search and rescue. Looking for hikers stranded by the storm.""Do you believe her?""No." Celeste turned. Her face was drawn, exhausted, but her eyes were clear. "But I believe she'll keep us safe."I pushed myself off the couch. The fire had died overnight, leaving only embers and the smell of smoke. Emilia was still asleep in the armchair, her head tilted back, her mouth slightly open. She looked younger in sleep. Less armored."The broadcast," I said. "What's the reaction?"Celeste handed me her phone. The screen was flooded with notifications—news alerts, social media posts, messages from numbers I didn't recognize. I scrolled through the headlines.Celeste Laurent Accuses Forme

We didn't sleep that night.Instead, we gathered around the table like generals planning a war. Maps spread across the wood. Laptops glowing. Coffee cups emptying and refilling in an endless cycle. Hana had brought in a second operative—a woman named Kaelen who specialized in tracking fugitives through digital footprints."Thorne is offline," Kaelen reported, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "No credit card usage. No phone pings. No social media activity. He's gone dark completely.""He had help," Emilia said for the third time. "Someone met him at the river. Someone with a boat and a vehicle and a plan.""Then we find the helper." Celeste leaned over the map. "Someone in Thorne's inner circle who wasn't at the summit. Someone who stayed in the shadows."Mireille pulled up a list on her laptop. "I've been cross-referencing Thorne's known associates with travel records from the past 48 hours. Twelve people left Switzerland within six hours of the broadcast. Most of them have ali

The sirens grew louder, then deafening, then softened into the organized chaos of an arrest. Swiss federal police flooded the estate—blue lights spinning across the marble floors, radios crackling, voices barking orders in German and French and English.I watched them take Aris Thorne away.He didn't struggle. Didn't speak. Just walked between two officers with his cuffed hands and his bleeding shoulder and his eyes fixed on something none of the rest of us could see. Fifteen years of running. Fifteen years of building empires on bones. It ended not with a bang or a whimper, but with the quiet efficiency of men who'd done this a thousand times before.Celeste stood beside me, her gun confiscated, her hands trembling slightly. She'd been interviewed already—three officers in rapid succession, each one more deferential than the last. The cut on her cheek had been cleaned. The bruise on her jaw was darkening."You're staring," she said."You almost died.""I almost killed someone. There'

The autumn storms came early that year.Rain lashed against the whitewashed walls of our Portuguese house, drumming on the roof tiles, turning the garden into a swamp of mud and fallen lemons. Lucky refused to go outside. The small white poodle had taken up permanent residence on Celeste's lap, trembling dramatically whenever the wind rattled the windows."The dog is afraid of the weather," Celeste observed."The dog is sensible. The weather is dangerous.""Rain is not dangerous.""Lightning is. Thunder is. The way the Atlantic throws itself against the cliffs—that's dangerous." I curled deeper into the couch, pulling a blanket over my legs. "We should move somewhere with better weather. The Caribbean. The Maldives. Somewhere the sun shines all year."Celeste looked at me over the top of Lucky's head. "You hate the sun. You're always complaining about the sun.""I hate extreme weather of all kinds. Is that so wrong?"She laughed—a sound that had become more frequent over the past mont

We didn't plan to celebrate.That was the thing about surviving something like we'd survived—the anniversaries snuck up on you. One morning you woke up and realized that a year had passed since the broadcast. A year since Geneva. A year since Thorne's arrest.A year since we'd stopped running.Celeste was in the garden when I found her, kneeling in the dirt, her hands covered in soil. She'd expanded her domain over the past twelve months—the roses had multiplied, the lavender had spread, and a small vegetable patch now occupied the sunny corner near the lemon trees."You're up early," she said without looking up."You're already dirty.""Gardening is not a clean activity."I sat on the stone wall beside her. Lucky immediately abandoned his post by the rosemary bush to climb into my lap. "Do you know what today is?"Celeste sat back on her heels. Wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a smear of dirt across her skin. "The day the world ended. And began again.""I was th