No Escape from the Billionaire’s Contract의 모든 챕터: 챕터 141 - 챕터 147

Kaelen was in a meeting three floors up, entirely unaware that his wife was being walked out of the company that bore his name, and no one, in the chaos and speed of it all, had yet thought to tell him.Kaelen heard about it from an assistant's frightened knock rather than from anyone with the authority to have stopped it, and by the time he understood what the words she was saying actually meant, Zariel had already been gone from the building for eleven minutes."Say that again," he said, standing so fast his chair rolled backward into the wall behind him."The security audit found a device in you home study. The board voted to suspend her clearance. She's already been escorted out, sir. I only just heard myself.""Who authorized the vote. Who was in that room?""I don't have the full list yet, sir. It happened very fast.""Get me the full list. Every name, every vote, within the hour." He was already moving past her, already re

"I would strongly advise against this," the lawyer said, for the third time in as many minutes, trailing Zariel through the staff quarters hallway with the persistence of a man being paid to worry. "Any direct contact with Mrs. Delgado before we've reviewed her testimony could be construed as witness tampering. Let us handle this properly, through counsel.""She's not a witness against me, she's a woman who was terrified into a corner." Zariel kept walking, badge still deactivated, moving through the building on nothing but Kaelen's temporary override and her own refusal to wait one more hour for permission to do the right thing. "I am not interested in handling her properly. I am interested in making sure she's safe before anyone else in this building decides she's disposable.""Mrs. Sterling, I understand the impulse, but if this goes badly, it could complicate an already fragile legal position.""My legal position is already fragile because a stran

"Kaelen...""He's not hurting anyone. I promise you that. Go finish what you're doing with Martha. I need thirty minutes, and then I need you back here, because I have a feeling we are about to need your instinct for mercy considerably more than my instinct for consequences."He watched Merlin's team walk Pruitt back down the hallway, and felt something old and familiar rising in his chest, the specific anger of a man who had trusted this building's walls to keep his family safe and had just learned, again, exactly how porous they actually were.He set that anger aside, carefully, the way he'd learned to over the last several weeks. There would be time for it later. Right now there was a board still primed to believe the worst about his wife, and he had exactly enough evidence, if he presented it correctly, to change that.***The board reconvened within the hour, considerably less certain of itself than it had been that morning, and

"How do we make sure Dale sells it convincingly," Zariel asked. "He's already terrified. Terrified people don't always perform believable calm.""We don't ask him to perform calm," Silas said. "We ask him to sound like a man reluctantly passing along something he probably shouldn't. Reluctance reads as authenticity. Confidence would read as rehearsal.""That's oddly specific tradecraft for an auditor.""I contain multitudes, Zariel. Most of them exhausting."Silas made the call to Pruitt himself, walking him through the exact phrasing, precise enough to sound like an overheard fragment rather than a rehearsed script. By evening, it was done, the small, deliberate lie released into the same channel that had nearly destroyed Zariel's life a day earlier, now working, for the first time, in their favor instead of against them."Now," Kaelen said, "we wait."***The waiting proved considerably harder than either of them