All Chapters of REBORN TO BE A BILLIONAIRE: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

44 Chapters

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ADRIAN’s POVI had been carrying the question for over four years now. Four years since the night I sat in the conference room and listened to a recording from a dead man’s phone while Damien stood beside me.Damien had said he knew the voice from the recording but he had said nothing after that.I had asked him twice again that night and he told me he had been mistaken. That the distortion made it impossible to identify and that he had spoken too quickly.But I watched his face while he said it and I had let it go because letting it go was the strategic decision at that time. Pressing Damien on something he had decided to withhold was like pressing water, it simply moved around you and gave you nothing.So I just stopped pressing and waited. But tonight. I stopped waiting.Tonight I had gone through every piece of material my security team had accumulated since the archive breach, the SUV footage, the payment records, the suppressed report fragments, the Hale connection, Ava Bennett'

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

ADRIAN’s POVThe port district at midnight looked exactly like the kind of place a man chose when he needed to be certain nobody followed him.Narrow streets running between warehouse buildings, the smell of salt water and diesel, lights sparse enough that the dark between them felt deliberate. My driver had driven without headlights for the last two blocks at my instruction. The car sat now in a loading bay three buildings from the address Reeves had sent. I had come alone, or close enough. My driver waited with the car and one security member stood at the building entrance with instructions not to follow me inside. Some conversations required the particular atmosphere that came from two people sitting in a room without witnesses.The building was an old shipping office, decommissioned years ago by the look of it, the kind of structure that existed in port districts as a kind of institutional memory nobody had yet gotten around to demolish. A single light burned somewhere inside on

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

ADRIAN’s POVFour years ago, Damien had stood in a conference room and listened to a recording of a voice coordinating the accident that unalived Serena and my son and had said he recognized the voice. And then changed and said he was mistaken.And for four years while I buried my wife, struggled with my company and married another woman. Slowly, accepted a version of events that left him entirely outside the frame.And just last night again, he had sat across from me and handed me Gerald Fitch. The thoughts in my mind raced against each other.“There’s one more thing,” Reeves said.I looked up. He reached across and turned to the second page of the folder.Another document. An ok der paper, the scan slightly uneven, the kind of file that had been photographed rather than properly digitized. It was an internal communication record. It carries Laurent Group headed paper, and was dated six weeks before the accident.I read it, then I read it again more slowly.It was a memo routed from

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ADRIAN’s POVCeleste arrived home on a Thursday afternoon.I had known her flight time since Tuesday when her assistant forwarded the itinerary as she always did. I was in the study when I heard the car pull in.I didn’t go downstairs, I stayed at the desk with the folder from Martin Reeves locked in the drawer beside me.A few minutes later, she appeared in the study doorway looking exactly as she always looked, polished and composed. “You’re home,” I said.“Three days early.” She smiled. “The Geneva meetings wrapped faster than expected. The Beaumont family were more agreeable than anticipated once the numbers were properly structured.”She approached slowly and kissed my cheek. The familiar scent of her perfume arrived with her, expensive and precise, the same one she had worn since we met.“How was the house?” she asked as she sat into the chair across the desk from me.“Quiet,” I said.She looked at me with precise attention. Celeste had a taxonomy of my silences that she had de

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

SELENE’S POVI was still at my desk when the message arrived in the evening. I had been reviewing the Tokyo partnership terms, making margin notes in the shorthand Clara had learned to decode, when my personal phone lit up beside the acquisition file.The number was known to fewer than eight people in the world.I looked at the screen and it was a message from ADRIAN LAURENT.I sat very still for a moment, then I picked up the phone and read it. We need to meet. The words were perfectly clear but I read them over and over again, till I noticed I’ve done that more than a healthy times. Adrian Laurent did not send imprecise messages. Every word in that sentence had been chosen and placed deliberately, which meant every word carried exactly the weight he intended it to carry.Not as business but he was telling me he knew enough to step outside the professional frame that had contained every interaction between us since the gala. Enough to reach past Selene Arden the billionaire and ad

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

ADRIAN’S POVI chose the house on Hollow Pine Road because it belonged to no one anymore, though, it had been my grandfather’s once before the Laurent empire now. Back when the family still measured its worth in land rather than markets.Nobody used it, my mother found it too rustic for entertaining and Damien had never expressed interest in anything that didn’t come with a view of the financial district. The house is located at the edge of the city where the buildings thinned into trees. It is a single-story stone house with a wraparound porch and a fireplace that still worked even while not in use for years. I told my driver to wait at the gate while I walked in first and lit the fire myself. It felt strange after years of staffs doing it, my hands remembering the motion more easily than I expected. The flames caught slowly as I stood in front of them for a while without thinking about anything in specific.At exactly seven in the evening, headlights moved along the gravel drive.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

ADRIAN’S POVThe way she said my name sounds so familiar. Like she had known me for years, slow and unmistakable, like a door swinging open into a room.I had heard that exact cadence before. But the way the syllables fell. The particular rhythm of my own name in someone else’s mouth.I looked at Selene Arden across the firelight and for the first time, let myself look properly beyond the face. But it gave me nothing, and I understood now with sudden clarity that the face was never going to. But at everything underneath the face, the exact angle she held her shoulders. The way her hands stayed perfectly steady when everything else in the room felt unsteady. “Serena used to fold her hands exactly like that,” I said quietly, “when she was holding something back.”Selene’s hands did not move but something in her breathing changed almost unnoticed. The kind of change you only caught if you had spent years learning to read someone closely enough that their stillness had its own vocabular

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

SELENE'S POVThe Meridian Capital report got to my desk at eight-forty in the morning. Clara had reported it urgent with a single line of annotation beneath the subject heading.You need to read this before the nine o'clock.Meridian Capital was a mid-tier investment firm with a quiet but consistent presence in the city's financial architecture. Not powerful enough to command attention at the level Arden Corporation operated, but embedded deeply enough in the supply structures beneath the elite market that its movements mattered when they occurred. It had been unimportant to my plans. Not a target, but definitely not an ally. Three days ago, Meridian Capital had begun acquiring a controlling interest in Calloway Data Solutions.Calloway Data Solutions was not a company most people had reason to know. It processed encrypted financial communications for private corporations operating across multiple jurisdictions. Unremarkable on its surface but buried inside its client list. It is ma

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

ADRIAN’s POVWords moved faster inside Laurent Group. By the time I walked into the boardroom, every seat at the long table was already filled, and the quality of silence that greeted me told me the conversation waiting for me was not going to be comfortable.I sat at the head of the table and let the silence stretch for a moment before anyone spoke.Rowan Wren, the longest-serving board member and the closest person Laurent Group had to an institutional conscience, broke it first."Adrian." He folded his hands on the table in front of him. "We need to understand the Calloway intervention.""I filed a competing interest claim," I said. "And that triggered an automatic suspension of Meridian Capital's acquisition.""We're aware of the mechanics," Wren said. "We need to understand the reasons behind your move."Of course, I had an explanation prepared for this kind of question, layered carefully enough to hold up under scrutiny without revealing the actual motivation underneath it. "Ca

CHAPTER FORTY

SELENE’s POVI went to Leonard's residence at the end of the day, when the light outside had gone grey-gold of the early evening. His housekeeper had already set the table for one, which she adjusted without comment the moment I arrived.I found Leonard in the study, a glass of whiskey sat on the side table beside him, reading with focused attention on a tablet. He looked up when I entered and set the tablet down."You don't usually come at this hour.""I have something to tell you." I said as I took the chair across him he gestured toward me. "Adrian Laurent contacted me three nights ago," I said. "And we met privately."Leonard's hands resting against the arm of his chair, stayed still. His face held its usual composure, the particular stillness that had upset boardrooms and intimidated governments for decades.I had spent the last four years studying that stillness the way a student studied a difficult language, and I caught the precise half-second delay before he responded."Wher

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