All Chapters of Billionaire's Biggest Regret : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Damien's POVI did not confront Edward Hart the week I found out he'd paid his own daughter to walk into my company.I want that understood plainly, because for a long time I told myself the delay was strategy — that a man like Edward needed to be dismantled with evidence solid enough that he couldn't talk his way out of a room, the way he'd talked his way into every room I'd ever seen him in. I built a file instead of picking up a phone. I told myself patience was a virtue I'd finally learned.The truth was simpler and less flattering. I was afraid of what came after. Exposing Edward meant admitting, in the same breath, exactly how much of my marriage he'd been permitted to dismantle while I stood in rooms with him and called it business.Thirteen months passed that way.I sat across from Edward at a quarterly board dinner in the ninth month, close enough to refill his glass myself when the waiter missed it, and listened to him tell a story about Vanessa's childhood — some anecdote a

Damien's POV"Edward."He looked up from his desk, reading glasses pushed low on his nose, and took them off slowly when he saw my face."Damien. I wasn't expecting you." He gestured at the chair across from him. "Sit. You look like a man who needs a drink before he says whatever he came here to say.""I'll stand."He set his glasses down on a folder, aligning them with the edge, unhurried. "That bad.""The Meridian photographs were altered. Timestamps moved by hand. Sent through a shell company registered to a firm that's worked for you for twenty years."He didn't move. He'd been still before I said it and he stayed still after, which told me more than any reaction would have."That's quite an accusation.""It's not an accusation. I have the audit trail." I put my hands flat on the edge of his desk and leaned in, close enough that he had to look up at me instead of past me. "You paid Vanessa six weeks before she rejoined the company. I have the wire."Something shifted behind his ey

Aria's POVThirteen Months Ago"Say it again," I said. "Slower this time."Damien's voice on the other end of the line didn't waver, which somehow made it worse. "The photographs were altered. Thirteen months ago. I've known since then."I sat down on the edge of my bed, Elias's monitor glowing faintly on the nightstand, and let the number sit in the room with me. Thirteen months. He had known for thirteen months that I hadn't left a marriage — I'd left a lie, engineered by a man who wasn't even in it, and Damien had known that the entire time I was learning to breastfeed alone at three in the morning, the entire time I filed my first business registration with shaking hands, the entire time I told myself the divorce was simply the truth finally catching up to us.I got through the rest of the call somehow. I don't remember agreeing to anything except silence — mine, immediate, non-negotiable — and I remember hanging up and sitting very still on the edge of the bed for long enough tha

Aria's POV"Ms. Bennett? This is Priya Anand, I write for the Style section — do you have a comment on the piece running tomorrow?"I stood in my kitchen with the phone against my ear and Elias on my hip, and something in my stomach dropped before she'd even said what the piece was about."What piece.""About your business funding. There's a source alleging Bennett Interiors was built on undisclosed money from your ex-husband, and that you've misrepresented your client contracts as a result. I wanted to give you the chance to respond before we go to print."I set Elias down in his playpen, my hands not quite steady, and asked her to send me what she had.The email came through two minutes later. A draft, not published yet, quoting an anonymous "source close to the Knight family" who described me as a woman who'd "engineered a public divorce for financial gain" and "quietly accepted seven figures from the man she claims wronged her." There were numbers in it that were wrong, dates that

Aria's POVWhat Vanessa Knew"You came," Vanessa said, when we found her in the back booth of a diner in Sunset Park, a neighborhood none of us had any reason to be in, exactly the point."You said it was urgent." Damien slid into the booth across from her. I sat beside him, closer to him than I might have chosen a week earlier, though neither of us mentioned it.She'd picked a booth in the back corner, facing the door, the way people do when they've spent a long time learning to watch entrances without meaning to. A waitress came by and Vanessa ordered coffee for all three of us without asking, then waited until she'd walked away and was out of earshot near the register before she spoke again."I didn't sleep at all," Vanessa said. "After Damien's call. I kept going back through things I'd spent years not letting myself think about too carefully." She turned her cup a slow half-circle, the same gesture I'd started to notice in everyone who sat in these booths across from us lately, l