Semua Bab I Left Broken and Fat, I Came Back His Boss With Triplets: Bab 11 - Bab 20

Emma's POVThe twins are running.I say twins because that is what it feels like when Ace and Grey move at full speed through an apartment simultaneously, two small people with absolutely no concept of obstacles or consequences, and Willa walks behind them at a measured pace with her rabbit under her arm and the expression of someone who has decided that dignity is worth the sacrifice of speed.They are fourteen months old.My apartment has ceased to be a living space and has become a terrain.Everything below knee height is either bolted to the wall, removed entirely, or has already been destroyed by Ace and is currently being examined by Grey and will subsequently be reorganised by Willa into a system only she understands.I move the coffee table on a Wednesday after Ace uses it to launch himself at the sofa for the third time in a day, and I stand in the living room and look at the space where it was and think about the apartment in LA with its perfectly curated surfaces and its art

Liam's POVMarcus works on it for six weeks.I have not asked him to work on it for six weeks. I have asked him to find out who runs Bellamy Inc, and I have expected the answer to arrive within three or four days because Marcus is the specific kind of assistant who finds things, and there has never been a piece of information in fifteen years that he has not produced for me on request.Six weeks pass.He does not produce it.He comes to me on a Monday morning with the specific expression of a man about to deliver a partial answer to a complete question and tells me that Bellamy Inc's CEO is one of the most carefully protected identities he has ever encountered."How carefully?" I ask."No public records. No press. No industry appearances. The board handles everything. Every legal filing has been done through intermediaries. Every property connected to the company is registered to shell entities." He pauses. "Sir, this is the kind of protection you build when you specifically do not wan

Liam's POVMarcus finds it on a Tuesday.He does not make a production of it. He sets it on my desk at the end of a briefing, a small printed photograph, the kind taken on a phone and printed later, worn at the edges the way things get when they have been handled more than once."Found in the linen closet during the apartment reorganisation," he says. "I thought you might want it."He leaves before I can respond, which is a Marcus thing, delivering information and removing himself before the response becomes something he would have to navigate.I look at the photograph.It is Emma.At some event, maybe a year into the marriage, an outdoor function in the evening, the light going warm behind her. She is turned slightly away from the camera, looking at something off to the left, and she is laughing.Not the careful social smile I watched her deploy at events, the one she put on with the same deliberateness she put on the black dress, but the real smile. The full face kind. The kind that

Liam's POVMarcus puts the page on my desk at four seventeen on a Wednesday afternoon and steps back.He does not say anything.He does not have to.I look at the page.It is a company registration document from the French business registry. Standard format. Filed approximately two years ago. Registered address on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Business category. Board composition.And then the founder line.I read the name.I read it again.My office is very quiet.Outside the window, Los Angeles is doing the thing it does in the late afternoon, the light going gold and sideways, long shadows across the city that always look more dramatic than they have any right to.I pick up the page."How did you find this?""The French business registry is public record," Marcus says, and there is something in his voice that is not quite apology but is in the same neighbourhood. "I was focused on the operational structure. Board composition. External communications. I should have looked at the orig

Liam's POVParis does not feel the way I remember it.I land Saturday morning instead of Monday because I moved the flight, and I have not examined why I moved the flight, and I am not going to examine it now in the back of a car on the way from Charles de Gaulle while Paris arrives around me in the October morning.The city is doing what it does. Cream and grey and rooftops and the specific quality of light that happens here and nowhere else, and I sit in the back seat and look at it and feel, without understanding why, like I am in someone else's city.Not a foreign city.Someone specific's city.The hotel is the George V, where it always is, and my room looks out over rooftops and the morning air coming through the cracked window smells like bread and stone and autumn. I stand at the window and look at the city and I tell myself today is for getting oriented and the meeting conversation begins Monday.I believe this for approximately forty minutes.Then I go for a walk.I tell mysel