Semua Bab The Glass Contract - His Captive Bride: Bab 21 - Bab 30

The digital key did not merely match the terminal interface; it clicked home with a heavy, pressurized hydraulic hiss that sounded like a tomb unsealing.Grace sat frozen at her dark walnut desk in the West Wing of the estate, the pale, clinical glow of her laptop screen washing over her face. Outside, the relentless Canadian night seemed to press against the massive glass panels, but inside, the only reality that existed was the harsh, blue-tinted light reflecting off her widening eyes. Her bare feet were tucked beneath her silk robe, her toes curling tightly into the plush fabric as a cold, heavy dread dropped straight into the pit of her stomach, paralyzing her from the inside out. The file path she had spent the last three hours routing through her father's archived servers had finally broken down its last compliance wall. Every firewalled layer she had peeled back felt like digging through a digital graveyard, and now, she had reached the bedrock.The directory title on the scr

The facade did not crack until the tires of the armored Maybach met the pristine, snow-dusted gravel of the Edmonton Grand Horizon Pavilion.For twenty-four hours, Grace had lived in a state of suspended animation, her mind a closed circuit of frantic calculations and cold, unyielding panic. The West Wing of the estate had felt less like a luxury suite and more like a high-security holding cell after Elias had snapped her laptop shut, stripping her of the digital tokens that were her only line of sight into the Vance Global servers. She had spent the day under the meticulous care of a styling team he had explicitly dispatched to the house—a silent armada of tailors, makeup artists, and hair stylists who moved around her with the clinical efficiency of a pit crew preparing a high-performance machine for a high-stakes race.Now, sitting in the suffocating luxury of the vehicle’s leather interior, she looked down at her hands. Her nails were manicured to a flawless, translucent sheen, a

The dawn that broke over the North Saskatchewan River valley did not bring warmth; it arrived as a cold, slate-grey sheet of light that bled through the floor-to-ceiling glass, cutting the shadows of the VIP lounge into sharp, clinical angles.Grace woke all at once, her mind instantly firing on all analytical cylinders before her eyes even adjusted to the glare. Her body was stiff, a dull ache radiating from her lower back where the unyielding travertine table had offered no concession to the frantic, consuming storm of the night before. She was wrapped in Elias’s midnight-black wool tuxedo jacket, the heavy fabric smelling profoundly of him—cedarwood, vintage bourbon, and the cooled, musky tang of raw adrenaline.Beside her, the space on the charcoal leather sofa was empty.She sat up, holding the lapels of the jacket tightly against her collarbone as her eyes swept the room. The wreckage of the night was gone. The obsidian silk gown had been meticulously gathered and draped over th

The silver fork scraped against the porcelain with a sharp, metallic ring that seemed to echo too loudly in the vastness of the dining room.Grace kept her eyes trained on the thin, perfectly translucent ribbon of smoked salmon on her plate. Her mind, usually a pristine grid of logical pathways and clear-cut data streams, felt like a server room undergoing a massive, unprompted reboot.Across the dark walnut table sat Elias. He hadn’t touched his espresso. He was simply watching her, his dark eyes holding that terrifying, unblinking intensity that she had initially written off as the mark of a corporate sociopath. Now, after the revelations in the East Wing library—after seeing her mother’s name etched into a decade’s worth of surveillance files and protective counter-ops—she had to reframe everything.The stalker wasn’t a stalker. He was a guardian. The forced marriage wasn't a hostage situation; it was a tactical extraction.At least, that’s what the data says, her subconscious whis

The midnight air inside the Thorne estate was suffocatingly still.Grace stood in the center of her dressing room, staring at her reflection in the full-length gilded mirror. She had stripped away the elegant, minimalist silk dress she’d worn to dinner with Elias—a dinner where she had forced her face into a mask of placid compliance while her stomach churned with every casual, predatory smile he directed her way. Now, she wore a pair of dark, heavy denim jeans, a matte-black cashmere sweater, and flat leather boots.Her heart beat a frantic, uneven rhythm against her ribs, but her hands were entirely steady as she packed her leather tote bag. Inside went her personal laptop, a high-capacity portable SSD, and a small, tactical locksmith kit she had bought years ago during a corporate espionage scare at Vance Global—a tool kit she had never dreamed she would actually have to use on her own husband's home.Look at the original acquisition files. The truth isn't in the routing numbers.