All Chapters of DIVORCE ME, MR. BILLIONAIRE: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Ryan reached her before she'd even finished the sentence, his hand landing on her shoulder with a weight that felt more like relief than concern, like he'd been holding his breath since the moment he lost sight of her in the crowd."You were gone too long," he said. "What happened?"Amelia looked at him and felt the entire night pressing down at once, the terrace, Victor's recording, Marcus's confession, and now this, a new voice on the phone claiming to be holding a man hostage while asking her to smile through a party like nothing was wrong. She opened her mouth to answer and nothing came out."Amelia." Ryan's voice dropped, softer now, the kind of soft he almost never let anyone hear. "Talk to me.""Not here," she said, glancing past him toward the ballroom, where laughter and clinking glasses continued as if the entire building hadn't just tilted sideways underneath her. "I can't do this here."He didn't argue. He just took her hand, and for once she let him, and the three of them

Gregory's office door stood wide open when they reached it, and that alone was enough to turn Amelia's stomach. He never left it open. Not for coffee. Not for anything.She stepped inside first, ignoring Ryan's hand reaching for her sleeve, and for one breath she let herself believe everything was fine, because Gregory was standing right there behind his desk, alive, upright, safe. Then she saw his face and the relief drained out of her all at once.Drawers hung open. Papers covered the floor like someone had swept an arm across the desk without caring what fell. Gregory stood in the middle of it looking like a man who'd just watched thirty years of careful order come apart in ten minutes."They took the file," he said. His voice had none of its usual calm. "The letter. The financial records from the hearing. Gone.""Not gone," Ryan said, crouching to check the scattered papers. "Copied, probably. Whoever did this wasn't stealing. They were reading."Amelia's mind went straight to the

For one terrible second, nobody breathed.The darkness came down so completely that Amelia lost every edge of the room at once, the chair, Marcus's shoulder still under her hands, the doorway where Gregory had been standing. All of it was swallowed whole. Somewhere close, she heard Ryan's voice, low and urgent, saying her name like he was trying to find her by sound alone."I'm here," she said, and her own voice sounded strange to her, thin and too loud in the sudden black. "I'm right here.""Don't move," Ryan said. "Nobody moves until we know what happened.""The breaker," Gregory said from somewhere near the door, his voice tight with something that wasn't quite panic yet but was close enough to taste. "There's a panel down the hall. If someone tripped it on purpose—"He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.Amelia's hands were still on the cord around Marcus's wrists, and she made herself keep working at it, fingers clumsy in the dark, because stopping felt more dangerous

Amelia stared at the screen until the words blurred, her own name sitting there in black and white beside her grandmother's, beside Marcus's, a private grief turned into something the whole city could scroll past on their way to bed."Who posted this," she said, and her voice came out flatter than she expected, exhaustion finally burning through fear and landing somewhere close to numbness."I don't know," Selene said, still staring at her phone like it might change if she looked hard enough. "It's not attributed to anyone. Just an account created tonight.""Convenient," Ryan said, his jaw tight.Gregory hadn't moved from where he stood near the door, his hand still pressed against the empty pocket where the recording used to be, like his body hadn't caught up yet to what his mind already understood. "Someone was in this building the entire time," he said slowly. "Not just Lucas. Not just Selene. Someone else, moving through all of this while we chased shadows."Marcus finally spoke,

Charles Gregory Whitmore.The letters finished loading, and for a moment Amelia couldn't make her mind connect them to anything at all, like the sight of them had short-circuited something essential in her brain.Then her hand slipped free of Gregory's, and she took a step back without deciding to, putting distance between herself and the man standing beside her, the man whose fingers had been laced through hers not thirty seconds earlier."Gregory," she whispered. "That's your name. Your full name."He hadn't moved. He was staring at the screen with an expression she couldn't read, something caught between disbelief and a grief so old it had calcified into something else entirely."I haven't gone by Charles since I was a boy," he said quietly. "Nobody's called me that in decades. My father insisted on it as a child, wanted me to carry his name forward, and I hated every syllable of it.""That doesn't answer the question," Ryan said, his voice hard, protective, stepping slightly in fr