บททั้งหมดของ Her Dark Obsessions:Claimed By The Plus-Size Ruthless Harem: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

**Chapter 21: Escalation** The board meeting had been scheduled to run forty-five minutes. It ran two hours and ended with three department heads pale-faced in the hallway outside Jack's office, unwilling to be the one who told him the news a second time. Sora heard about it secondhand first, a clipped voicemail from Jack's assistant asking her to come up whenever she had a break, and then in full once she arrived to find him standing at the window with his back to the door, a printed document crumpled in one fist. "Jack?" He turned, and the look on his face was one she hadn't seen from him before — not the cold precision he wore in boardrooms, not the fierce protectiveness she'd come to associate with him. Something colder than either. Something that made her understand, for the first time, exactly how he'd built an empire from a rented office with bad plumbing in under a decade. "Donovan filed an injunction

**Chapter 23: Justin Chooses a Side**Reyes's "conversation" with Justin happened in a small, windowless meeting room on the fourteenth floor of Blackwood Corporation, the kind of anonymous corporate space designed to reveal nothing about the seriousness of what happened inside it. Justin sat across from her with his arms crossed, jaw tight, clearly aware of exactly what this meeting represented despite Reyes's careful insistence that it was simply routine."You were granted advisory access to the Ashford projections last month," Reyes said, laying out a printed log on the table between them. "Access logs show a remote login using your credentials at 11:47 PM, two nights before Donovan filed his injunction."Justin studied the log for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that Reyes, watching closely, couldn't quite identify — not the panic of a man caught, but something closer to genuine confusion working itself toward alarm."I wasn't

**Chapter 25: The Line Melvin Won't Cross Yet**Melvin told himself, driving to the mansion three days after the strategy meeting, that he only wanted to check on her. That the small gift bag on the passenger seat — a set of business cards from a print shop he happened to know did excellent work, the kind of thoughtful, useful gesture a friend might offer another friend rebuilding a company under siege — was nothing more than kindness. He'd told himself a version of that story the whole drive over, and he was still telling it to himself when Miranda answered the door and gave him a look that suggested she wasn't entirely convinced either."She's in the east study," Miranda said. "Working. You know she's got four men currently orbiting her life like it's a full-time occupation, right? I'm not sure she needs a fifth thing to manage today.""I'm not here to add to the pile," Melvin said. "I heard about the clients backing out. I wanted to help, if I could."Miranda studied him a moment l

**Chapter 27 — "The Consultancy's First Client"**The email sat open on Sora's laptop for eleven minutes before she let herself believe it was real.*We'd love to move forward with your proposal. When can you start?*Eleven minutes. She'd counted, because counting felt safer than hoping.She read it again. Then she stood up from the kitchen table so fast her chair scraped against the floor, and she laughed, an actual laugh, sharp and surprised, like it had been startled out of her."Okay," she said to the empty apartment. "Okay, okay, okay."Her phone was already in her hand before she decided to pick it up. Miranda answered on the second ring."I got one," Sora said. "A real client. Not a favor, not someone Jack talked to.... an actual company hired me.""Sora." Miranda's voice cracked with how loud it got. "Sora, oh my god.""Fairweather Home Goods. They want a full rebrand, social strategy, the whole

**Chapter 29 — "Cassie's First Crack"** Cassie had been sitting in her car across the street for forty minutes before Melvin came out of the restaurant alone. She'd told herself she wasn't going to come. She'd said it out loud that morning, to her own reflection, like saying it would make it true. *He's just having dinner. It's paperwork. It's nothing.* And then she'd found herself in the car anyway, parked where the streetlight didn't quite reach, watching the warm windows of that restaurant like she could will herself to see through brick. She saw them through the glass twice. Once near the beginning, Sora laughing at something, careful and small, the way people laugh when they're not sure they're allowed to yet. And once near the end, when Melvin leaned forward across the table and said something that made Sora go very still. Cassie's hands were shaking on the steering wheel by the time Melvin walked out into the night a