Semua Bab The Billionaire’s Blood Debt: Ruined by My Enemy: Bab 111 - Bab 120

Elowen's POV The executive floor at Vane Global had the hushed, uneasy energy of a hospital waiting room. Nobody was running. Nobody was shouting. But every conversation seemed to be happening behind half-closed doors, or in low, hurried pairs by the water stations and elevator banks. When Elsbeth Koch walked out the night before, she hadn't just resigned a title. She'd pulled the cork out of the entire hierarchy underneath her, leaving ninety floors of corporate machinery running on momentum and unanswered questions. I arrived just before nine, stepping off the elevator in my charcoal suit, my heels sharp against the terrazzo floor. The glass-walled corner office at the end of the east corridor sat dark. Koch’s assistant was still at her desk outside it, staring at a blank computer monitor like she was waiting for someone to tell her whether she still had a job to do. Across t

Elowen's POV The room went completely still. Outside, the East River slapped against the pilings under the floorboards, but inside the empty harbor house, the only sound was the wind finding its way in around the seal of the front door. I stared at Killian, my heart going hard against my ribs. Lazy Spider. I remembered exactly how Kateryna had frozen the first time he said those two words across a boardroom table. The color draining out of her face. Three years of fury just gone, like the floor under her had disappeared. And now he was looking at my brother. Leo sat perfectly still, his knuckles pale against the table. Whatever calm he'd carried into this restaurant had locked into something rigid and pale instead. He wasn't just surprised Killian had found us. He looked like a man watching someone re

Elowen's POV The ride back from Pier 17 took twenty minutes of gray asphalt and cold harbor air trapped inside a cab. I skipped the service elevator this time. I walked straight through the front turnstiles on Ninety, my coat still damp from the wind off the river, my eyes fixed ahead. The floor had quieted since noon, but the air still carried that restless, unsettled weight of people waiting to see who'd end up claiming the empty corner office. I went into my own office and shut the door. I didn't turn on the lamp. I didn't touch the files still open on my screen. I pulled my bag out from under the desk, dropped my notebook inside, unlocked the bottom drawer for my personal phone, and slipped it into my coat. There was nothing else in that room that actually belonged to me. I'd sat behind that desk nearly every day since the wedding, and every single thing on i

Elowen's POV I stayed in that bed until almost noon, which was something I hadn't let myself do since before the wedding. At some point the sun found its way through the curtains anyway, warm and stubborn, and I lay there watching the dust turn gold in it instead of gray, and decided, somewhere in that hour, that I wasn't going into the office. I wasn't calling Garrett. I wasn't checking the drawer where my second phone sat waiting to ruin whatever was left of the day. I was just going to be a person for a few hours, the way I used to be, before any of this started. I showered longer than I needed to, standing under the water until my fingers pruned, and got dressed in something that wasn't charcoal wool or white silk: an old pair of jeans I found shoved to the back of a drawer I hadn't opened in months, soft from wear, and a sweater that had never once been near a boardroom. I looke

Elowen's POVThe boardroom on ninety smelled of lemon oil polish and cold morning air when the doors closed at nine sharp.Chairman Koch's seat at the head of the table sat empty, her resignation from two nights before still hanging over the room like something nobody had figured out how to file away yet. The ten remaining directors sat in stiff, careful rows, folders closed, coffee untouched. Croft looked smaller than usual in his charcoal suit, his knuckles pressed flat into the wood, whatever defiance he'd carried earlier in the week gone completely.Killian didn't take the seat two places down, the one they'd moved him to after the suspension.He walked straight to the head of the table, pulled out the tall leather chair, and stood behind it instead of sitting, palms resting flat on the wood. Dark navy suit, sleeves buttoned sharp, hair combed back with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything, like rescuing forty million dollars overnight had been barely worth mentio