Semua Bab The Billionaire’s Blood Debt: Ruined by My Enemy: Bab 101 - Bab 110

Elowen's POV The numbers scrolled across my monitor in their usual green streams, but for the first time since I'd taken this office, they didn't mean anything to me at all. I sat behind my desk for four hours that morning, signing off on shipping approvals and reading reports that were already gone from my head five minutes after I'd finished them. My hands did the work out of habit. The rest of me was still in that quiet room from the night before, listening to my brother's voice cut straight through everything I thought I'd figured out about myself. *You're convincing yourself you're in charge because you can't stand the idea that you gave up eight months of your life for nothing.* By two o'clock, I couldn't sit there anymore. I closed my laptop, left without waiting for the afternoon calls, and took the elevator down to the garage, where Marcus already had the car door open befor

Elowen's POV I took a cab back uptown, my coat pulled tight around me, watching the wet storefronts blur past the window without really seeing any of them. The driver had the radio on low, some talk show arguing about the weather, and I found myself grateful for the noise, for anything that wasn't the sound of my own thoughts circling the same two whiskey glasses over and over. I didn't tell Marcus where I'd been. I didn't tell Killian either. I walked past the front desk with my eyes fixed straight ahead, past two assistants who glanced up and then quickly back down at their screens, went into my office, and shut the door before anyone could ask. I stood there a second with my back against the wood, letting my coat drip quietly onto the floor, before I made myself move. I called Garrett before I'd even sat down. "Where's Arthur?" I said, keeping my voice low.

Elowen's POV I left Lin's five minutes after Leo, giving him enough time to clear the corner before I pulled my collar up against the drizzle and stepped back out onto Mott Street. The rain had turned thin and sharp, slicking the cobblestones, smearing the neon signs above the storefronts into long red and yellow streaks on the wet asphalt. My phone was already in my hand before I reached the curb. Garrett called before I could tap his name. "Don't head toward Lafayette," he said, no greeting, his voice tight under the noise of the street. "Stay in the crowd." I kept walking, steady, past a fruit stand, my eyes moving over the rain-streaked windshields idling at the light. "What is it?" "You weren't followed here by Leo's guy, and it wasn't my team either," Garrett said. "There's a dark sedan half a block down on Pell, engine running. A man i

Elowen's POVAt six fifteen, my office door slid open without a knock.Killian walked in, coat over his arm, collar open. He didn't look like a man who'd just spent four hours watching forty million dollars disappear. He looked like he did on any ordinary evening, unhurried, settled."The room was getting close in there," he said, stopping at the edge of my desk. "Let's get out for an hour before nine.""We've got calls coming in from the European desks," I said, not looking up from my screen."Let the night staff log them," he said. "You haven't eaten since seven this morning, and nothing on ninety gets fixed by you staring at a Swiss filing number until your eyes go blurry."Ten minutes later we were in the back of the car, Marcus driving, the streets of lower Manhattan thick with evening traffic, headlights smearing gold across wet asphalt. The partition was up, and the quiet inside the car felt almost too sudden after the noise we'd just left.He took us to a small steakhouse a fe

Elowen's POV By seven thirty, I was fully dressed. Hair pinned back the way it always was, suit jacket buttoned, watch fastened. Every part of my morning had gone through its usual motions with the kind of mechanical care that comes from needing the routine more than actually feeling it, anything to keep from sitting too long with what had been said in that study last night. The penthouse was too quiet. No sound of ice against glass from the kitchen. No Marcus in the foyer with his tablet. No footsteps anywhere in the apartment at all, none of the ordinary noise that usually meant the day had already started without me. I walked down toward the master suite, frowning at the silence. The doors were slightly open. I pushed through into the dim, amber half light of a room with the shades still drawn, and there, tangled in the dark sheets, was Ki