All Chapters of The Billionaire's Showgirl: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Isabella said someone paid her to come, and for one foolish second, all I could think about was how badly I wanted my coffee to still be hot.Hot coffee felt like something a normal person deserved during a conversation like this.Instead, mine sat between us in a chipped white mug, cooling under the fluorescent lights while Don D’Caputo’s daughter folded her shame into perfect posture and waited for me to understand that the floor had just shifted again.“Paid you,” I repeated.Isabella’s fingers rested on the edge of her teacup.Long fingers.Steady.No rings.“No,” she said. “Not me directly.”“That is the kind of correction people make when the answer is worse.”Her mouth curved faintly, but it did not reach her eyes. “My family received money.”I glanced toward the café window.A woman with a stroller passed out

Brian did not say the suspect’s name in the coffee shop.That was how I knew it was bad.He got Isabella and me out through the back door with a level of quiet efficiency that made the entire afternoon feel less like real life and more like one of those spy movies where everyone wore sunglasses indoors and had tragic secrets.No one spoke until we were inside the black SUV.Not Isabella.Not me.Not Brian.The guards in the front seat kept their eyes forward. The strip mall disappeared behind us, ordinary and ugly and impossible, while my phone sat in my lap with Luca’s name still glowing from the missed calls.My hands smelled faintly of coffee.I hated that I noticed.It was such a useless detail when everything else was falling apart.“Brian,” I said finally, “who is it?”He looked at me through the rearview mirror.“Not here.”Isabella gave a soft laugh from beside me. “How theatrical.”Brian’s gaze flicked to her. “Miss D’Caputo, I am currently deciding whether you are a witness,

Everyone expected Luca to ruin him.I could feel it in the room.The board members sat perfectly still, hands folded, eyes lowered or fixed too hard on the table. Legal counsel had stopped typing. Marcus Bellhaven’s mouth was drawn into a grim line. Even Isabella, who had walked into New Zenith like a woman made of glass and knives, watched Luca with the careful stillness of someone who understood she might be witnessing the end of a man.Peter Lang stood near the screen, shoulders bowed, his apology still hanging in the air.Forgive me.No one breathed like they believed forgiveness was coming.Luca remained seated beside me, one hand resting on the table, the other loose against the arm of his chair. He looked calm now. Too calm. The kind of calm that did not mean peace. It meant the punishment had already been selected, wrapped, and sharpened.“Forgiveness,” Luca said, “is not a board action.”Peter swallowed.“I know.”“No,” Luca replied. “You don’t. Because if you understood forg

Ronan Kade sounded like the kind of name people gave to villains because reality had no imagination.That was my first thought.My second was that Luca knew it.Not recognized it the way someone recognized a name from an old article or a party guest list. Knew it. The knowledge had moved through him in the boardroom like a blade slipping between ribs, silent and precise.He did not explain.Not to Peter.Not to Isabella.Not to me.He ended the meeting within five minutes, ordered Brian to secure every record tied to Halcyon Ridge, Ronan Kade, Don D’Caputo, and his father’s early land acquisitions, then escorted me out of the boardroom with his hand barely touching my back.Barely.That was how I knew he was afraid of what would happen if he held on too tightly.We rode back to the penthouse in silence.Not the comfortable kind.Not even the angry kind.This silence had machinery inside it. I could practically hear Luca’s mind turning, locking doors, naming threats, building walls hig

New Zenith stopped looking like a dream after the photographer escaped.Before, even with the threats and the fire and the secrets buried beneath land records, the city had still managed to shine. Glass towers caught the sun. Construction lights glowed through the desert evenings. Workers moved with purpose. Nurses laughed in bright corridors. Children taped drawings to fresh-painted walls.It had felt alive.Now, from the back seat of Luca’s SUV, it looked watched.Every corner seemed to hold a lens. Every parked car seemed too still. Every worker in a cap, every man glancing down at his phone, every shadow beneath the pedestrian bridge made my pulse sharpen.The city had not changed.I had.Luca sat beside me, one hand resting near mine but not touching it. His phone buzzed constantly against his thigh. Brian was in the front passenger seat, speaking in low bursts into his earpiece while the driver took a service route I had n