All Chapters of Rebirth of the Billionaire’s Substitute Bride: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Kira’s POV Don Marcelo's smirk didn't fall so much as collapse, like something had been holding it up from underneath and someone had just kicked the support out. He looked at me, then at Aziel, waiting for the husband to do what husbands like him always did — step in, smooth things over, tell the pretty American thing to go back inside and let the men finish their business. But Aziel didn't move. He crossed his arms over his bare chest and leaned back against the stone balustrade like a man settling in to watch a show he already knew the ending to. I could feel the pride coming off him even without looking at him, thick and dark and entirely unbothered. I looked down at the tablet sitting on the marble, though truthfully I didn't need it open in front of me. Three years of living inside Athena's servers meant every account, every shell, every buried transaction Charles — no, Elon, it still felt strange in my mouth some days — had ever touched lived somewhere permanent in my head n

Kira’s POVThe federal medical facility upstate looked like the opposite of everything we'd just left behind in Zonal — white tile, fluorescent light, steel doors, marshals with rifles standing at every junction like the building itself was under siege.I walked the corridor with my boots clicking on the linoleum, Aziel a half-step behind me the whole way. They wouldn't let him past the checkpoint — the Warlord walking into a federal facility was the kind of thing that made agencies nervous in ways paperwork couldn't fix — but I could feel him back there anyway, steady, like gravity.We stopped at Room 412. Two agents in tactical gear stood in front of the door."Ten minutes, Mrs. Lockwood," the older one said, swiping his card. "Camera and audio the whole time. Director Harris is watching live.""Understood," I said, flat.I glanced back at Aziel. He gave me one nod, and I went in alone.The room was bare — hospital bed, heart monitor, one reinforced window looking out over a concret

Kira’s POVThe red light on my tablet didn't make a sound, but in that quiet boardroom it might as well have been screaming.Aziel's laugh cut off instantly. He felt my spine go rigid before I even said anything and leaned in over my shoulder, eyes locking onto the notification pulsing against the dark screen."The Russians?" he asked, voice already sliding back into Warlord territory. "Signed the contract and hit a port anyway?""No." My fingers were already moving, expanding the alert. "This isn't a police scanner ping or a basic tripwire. This is one of my deep Nyx protocols. Someone just cut the fiber-optic mainline at Logistics Hub Seven, down on the southern docks."Aziel straightened and hit his earpiece."Silas. Leave the bosses downstairs. Get to the command center. Now."We left the ring sitting on the obsidian table and took the stairwell down one floor into the glass fortress that was now mine.I dropped into the chair and my hands hit the keyboard fast, no hesitation. I d

Kira’s POVThe sub-basement at the estate had been built to survive a missile strike, according to the original architects. Tonight its only real job was making sure nothing that happened down there made it up to the lawn.I stood against a cold steel pillar in the shadows, tablet wired straight into the room's recording system. I wasn't just watching. I was making a record.Under the single hanging light sat the mercenary — the lieutenant, or whatever rank he actually held. Zip-tied to a bolted steel chair, jaw shattered and swollen where Aziel had already gone to work on him, but his eyes still had that fanatic shine, the kind that comes from believing nothing can actually touch you.Aziel stood outside the light, stripped down to a black t-shirt, and he wasn't pacing, wasn't performing. He just stood there, still, and the room felt smaller for it, thinner somehow, like there wasn't enough air to go around."You're a dead man," the mercenary spat, blood running down his chin, his ac

Kira’s POV The digital siege ended without a sound. No explosions, no glass breaking, nothing dramatic at all, just the quiet hum of the servers cooling down around me in the command center. I'd locked them out. The hackers threw everything they had at our firewalls for three straight hours, and I broke every finger they tried to reach into the Syndicate's accounts with. I sank back in the chair when it was all over and put my face in my hands, my whole body still buzzing with leftover adrenaline that had nowhere left to go. The glass doors hissed open behind me. I turned, and whatever I'd been about to say died in my throat. Aziel walked in still covered in the northern industrial sector. There was concrete dust in his hair, the scent of cordite and ash and something coppery clinging to him, and a smear of blood on his collar that I knew instantly wasn't his own. He didn't look like a man who'd won anything. He looked like someone who'd just walked out of a slaughterhous