Semua Bab Can’t Stay Away From My Best Friend’s Billionaire Brother: Bab 51 - Bab 60

The boardroom was packed. Executives filled every seat. Legal advisors lined the walls. The air was thick with tension. The audit into Damon’s division had reached its critical stage. Julian Cross sat near the head of the table. His expression was calm. Professional. But his eyes held a quiet satisfaction. He had orchestrated the motion. The doctored memo had done its work. The board had called this session to hear testimony. Ava sat beside Damon. Her hands steady on the folder in front of her. She had spent the night preparing. Hard data. Timelines. Evidence. This was her moment to fight back.The chairman called the meeting to order. “Miss Sinclair. You have requested to testify on behalf of Mr. Blackwood’s leadership. The floor is yours.”Ava stood up. Her voice was clear. Confident. She presented the data. Campaign metrics. Growth projections. The success of her department. She broke down the doctored memo line by line. Highlighted the discrepancies. The altered dates. The forged

Ava got the email on a Tuesday morning, forwarded from Damon’s assistant with a single line attached. New consultant starting today. Vivienne Marchetti will be leading crisis communications on the memo situation.She didn’t think much of it until she walked into the tenth floor conference room for the afternoon strategy meeting and saw her.Vivienne Marchetti looked like she had been built in a lab specifically to make other women feel underdressed. Tall, dark hair pulled back in a knot so severe it should have looked harsh but somehow made her cheekbones look sculpted. A cream suit that fit like it had been tailored that morning. She was already seated at the head of the table, laptop open, three assistants hovering behind her chair like she commanded a small army just by existing.“You must be Ava,” Vivienne said, not looking up right away. When she finally did, her eyes moved over Ava with the fast, assessing sweep of someone used to sizing up rooms for a living. “Damon’s told me a

Damon found her outside her apartment building, not inside it, because she hadn’t gone up yet. She was sitting on the concrete steps in the cooling evening air, jacket pulled tight around her, when his car pulled up too fast and stopped too hard at the curb.He got out before the engine had fully quieted. “You didn’t answer for three hours.”“I needed three hours.”He sat down next to her on the steps without asking, which under any other circumstance she would have found endearing, the billionaire in a five thousand dollar suit folding himself onto cold concrete because that was where she happened to be sitting. Tonight it just felt like one more thing he was doing right while everything underneath still felt wrong.“I saw you,” she said, before he could start explaining. “In your office. With her hand on your chest and you not moving away from it.”Something flickered across his face. Not guilt exactly. Recognition. “It wasn’t what it looked like.”“That’s what everyone says right b

Emma’s apartment smelled like rosemary and garlic when Ava arrived, candles already lit along the windowsill, a bottle of red breathing on the counter. It looked, on the surface, like any other dinner the two of them had thrown together over the years. It didn’t feel like one.“You invited Julian,” Ava said, setting a bottle of wine of her own on the counter. Not a question.“I invited my brother.” Emma’s chin lifted slightly, a small defiance in it. “Both of them. It’s about time we all sat at the same table without a courtroom or a boardroom involved.”Ava didn’t argue. She had learned, slowly and at real cost, that Emma’s loyalty ran deep and stubborn once it took root, and lately that loyalty had started stretching to include a man who’d spent the better part of a year trying to burn the family down from the inside. Ava understood the impulse. She still didn’t trust it.Damon arrived first, tie loosened, looking like a man bracing for something. He kissed Ava’s temple in the doorw

The email arrived from her biggest client’s VP of marketing at nine in the morning, polite and clipped in the specific way that always preceded bad news in Ava’s experience. Following some internal discussions, we’ve decided to open our account for review. We’ll be taking meetings with a few agencies over the coming weeks.Ava read it twice before she let herself react. The client was Halden Group, the account that had rebuilt her reputation after the scandal, the one her boss had staked the department’s credibility on. Losing it now, with her name only just clean again, would undo more than a year of careful repair.She called the VP directly instead of emailing back. He was apologetic in the vague, non committal way people got when someone else had already made the decision for them.“It’s not about your work,” he said. “Your work’s been excellent. We’ve just had an approach from another firm with an offer that’s hard to walk away from. Better rates, aggressive timeline, a lot of pr