Semua Bab One Night with My Ex-Fiancé’s Ruthless Brother: Bab 101 - Bab 110

(Keyla POV) The result was one word. *Excluded.* Holt unfolded the sealed report and read it without looking at anyone. No pause for effect, no careful buildup. Just the same measured voice he'd used throughout the proceedings, the voice of someone who believed the document mattered more than the person reading it. Around the table, the word landed differently on every face, and I found myself watching the reactions before I looked at my own. Eleanor let out a slow breath she'd clearly been holding for a while. It wasn't loud enough to draw attention, but I heard it anyway. She didn't smile. She didn't have to. The release was enough. Adrian's hand, which had been gripping the edge of the table for the last four minutes, finally loosened. He leaned back with the quiet relief of someone setting down a weight he'd convinced himself he had to carry alone. His eyes flicked toward Vivienne for barely a second. She gave him nothing in return. Just that perfectly composed expression she

(Draxler POV) Adrian's face changed before his mouth opened. That was the thing about Adrian — he'd always been legible if you knew where to look. Most people didn't look, because Adrian was charming in the surface register that absorbed attention, and charm was a kind of camouflage. But I'd grown up with him, and I knew the specific sequence: the small tightening around the jaw, the shift of weight, the micro-calculation that happened in his eyes when he'd been caught by something he hadn't prepared a response to. Keyla's line had caught him. *The only confusion that night started in your room.* He tried to recover with deflection — the standard move, the one that looked like offense. "She's deflecting," he said, to the room generally, which was the move of someone who wanted witnesses to a version of the conversation that hadn't happened yet. "This is what she does. Something doesn't go her way and suddenly it's everyone else's fault, it's the wedding—" "He humiliated me," Key

(Keyla POV) The meeting request came through Priscilla at ten in the morning with a one-line agenda: *Leo's reassurance following the result.* I read it once. Then again, slower this time, as if another sentence might appear if I stared long enough. It didn't. I reached for my phone and called Nora. She answered on the first ring. "No," I said before she could speak. Nora let out a quiet breath on the other end. "I figured that was going to be your first answer." I pushed my chair back from the desk. "He doesn't get to manage Leo's feelings after a result that..." "Keyla." She said my name in the specific way that meant she was about to say something I didn't want to hear. "Leo asked me this morning if the paper made Draxler leave. He asked me. Not you." A pause. "That question is out there now. Someone has to answer it." I looked at the meeting request on my laptop. *Leo's reassurance following the result.* That was all it said. No additional notes. No carefully disguised le

(Marcus POV) Marcus trusted panic. Panic was legible, predictable — it moved in the direction of the thing that had caused it, which made it traceable. People in panic revealed what they were protecting. Relief was different. Relief could be genuine, or it could be the particular performance of a person who had arranged the outcome they were expressing relief about. The difference was almost invisible, and almost was enough for Marcus's purposes. Adrian had been too fast. The result had been read at eleven-fourteen. At eleven-fourteen and approximately forty seconds, Adrian's hand had come off the table edge. Not in the gradual way of someone receiving information and processing it over several seconds — in the immediate way of someone whose body had registered confirmation of something it had been waiting for. The tension releasing before the rational mind had fully understood the language. Marcus had been watching Adrian's face for the specific sequence people showed when a res

(Keyla POV)I opened a blank email and typed: *Effective immediately.*Then I looked at those two words for a while.The cursor blinked at the end of them with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be. The hotel room was quiet — Leo was at the childcare center downstairs for the morning, which the hotel provided and which Leo had decided was acceptable because they had better crayons than our room. Nora was at the desk with her translation work, and I was on the bed with my laptop, writing the beginning of a resignation I had not yet finished deciding to send.“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?” Nora asked, without looking up from her screen.“I don’t know yet.” My voice came out quieter than I intended.She looked up then, pen still in hand.“The result was negative,” I said, closing the laptop halfway. “Which means I am sitting inside Churchill Sentinel on a consultant contract, investigating their communications failures, while every person in that building eith