Alle Kapitel von The Billionaire Who Regretted Letting Me Go : Kapitel 51 – Kapitel 60

By six the next morning, Alexander's phone hadn't stopped buzzing since David's call. Knight Holdings' stock had dropped further than he'd ever watched it fall in a single overnight session.He stood in his office in yesterday's shirt. The city skyline outside the window was grey and unbothered. He scrolled through headlines that hadn't existed twelve hours earlier. Cole Holdings Faces Scrutiny Over Leaked Internal Documents. Major Shareholders Demand Answers After Data Breach. Someone had handed financial projections, supplier contracts, and two unsigned acquisition deals to at least three different outlets. All at once. Timed for maximum damage."Talk to me," he said, the moment David walked through the door. David looked like he hadn't slept either."It's bad. But it's not fatal. Yet." David dropped a folder on the desk. His hands weren't quite steady. "Whoever did this had real access. Not outsider hacking. Insider knowledge. Files that don't exist anywhere outside our internal se

Adrian found Sophia outside Ethan's preschool, of all places. He leaned against an expensive car parked half a block down, like he'd been waiting there long enough to grow comfortable with it."You shouldn't be here," she said, stopping short. Every instinct in her body went taut and wary at the sight of him."I had a feeling you'd say that." Adrian's smile was easy, unbothered. The same smile that had unsettled her from the very first hallway. "I heard about the breach. Terrible business. I wanted to offer my condolences, professionally speaking.""You wanted to gloat." Sophia crossed her arms, refusing to let him see how unsteady his sudden appearance had made her. "Or you wanted to see how badly it's hurting him. Either way, I don't have time for it.""Sophia." He said her name with a patience that felt, somehow, more threatening than anger would have. "I've never once lied to you. Not when I helped with the apartment. Not when I told you what kind of man Alexander used to be. I'd

Alexander planned the evening for three days. He did it in between board calls and forensic accountants and the slow, sick dread of wondering which knight had betrayed him. He refused to let Adrian's revelation steal one more thing from him. Not this. Not the only part of his life that had ever felt entirely uncomplicated.He took Sophia to the rooftop of his building after Ethan was asleep at her sister's for the night. He'd strung string lights along the railing with his own hands, because he hadn't wanted strangers in the room for this. A small table was set with the kind of plain, unfussy food Sophia actually liked, instead of anything performative."This is a lot," she said, looking around. Equal parts touched and wary. The particular caution she still carried whenever something felt too good without warning."It's not about the lights." Alexander took her hands across the table, his thumbs brushing slow circles against her knuckles, grounding himself as much as her. "I needed yo

The security firm Alexander hired specialized in exactly this kind of problem—the quiet, internal kind, the kind companies didn't advertise. Their lead investigator, a clipped, methodical woman named Renata, laid out her findings on Alexander's desk with the flat, unsentimental delivery of someone used to handing people bad news about people they loved."The shell account receiving payment for the leak connects, through two more transfers, to a personal account," Renata said. "Not corporate. Personal. And the access pattern for the original data pull matches login behavior consistent with someone who didn't need to look up where anything was kept. Someone who already knew the architecture.""That could be half my executive team," Alexander said, though something in his gut already knew it was narrower than that."It could be," Renata agreed. "Except the account in question receives a holiday bonus deposit every December from the knight family trust. That's not a corporate payroll func

The file named a man Alexander had never heard of—a founding partner in the original knight shipping venture, pushed out under circumstances the documents described in carefully bloodless legal language, stripped of his stake in a company he'd helped build, his name quietly erased from every official record that followed.His name was Edmund Blackwell.Sophia read it over Alexander's shoulder, the name landing between them with the particular weight of a puzzle piece finally clicking into a shape neither of them wanted to see completed."Blackwell," she said slowly. "Alexander, that's—""Adrian's family." Alexander's voice had gone flat, hollow, the pieces assembling themselves into something far older and far more personal than either of them had imagined. "This isn't a business rivalry. This isn't even really about Halloway's shipping contract, or the custody case, or any of it. Adrian's been working toward this for years because my family stole something from his, decades before ei