Semua Bab RECLAIMING MY LIFE FROM THE UNTOUCHABLE CEO : Bab 71 - Bab 80

Hazel's POV“I found her,” Marcus said, sliding a folder across the kitchen table at seven in the morning, his eyes ringed with the particular exhaustion of a man who had not slept. “You are not going to like what is in it.”Julian opened the folder without hesitation. I leaned over his shoulder, my coffee forgotten, and stared at a photograph of a woman in her early thirties standing outside a courthouse, her face sharp and unreadable.“Vivian Hale,” Marcus confirmed. “Gerald’s only child. She changed her legal name after her parents divorced when she was sixteen. She has spent the last decade in and out of finance jobs, mostly short lived.”“Short lived how,” Julian asked, his voice sharp.“She gets close to powerful men,” Marcus said carefully. “Gains their trust. Then something always goes wrong at the company right after she leaves. Nothing provable. Just a pattern that follows her.”I set my coffee down, my hands suddenly unsteady. “So she is good at this. Whatever this is.”“Sh

Hazel's POV“Someone inside my own company has been feeding her our schedules for months,” Julian said, his voice low and dangerous as he stared at the message still glowing on my phone screen.We had called Marisol the moment we returned home, and within minutes Grace’s new nanny, a woman hired only three weeks earlier through a proper agency, was sitting nervously in the study answering Marcus’s careful questions.“I swear I have done nothing wrong,” the young woman said, her hands twisting in her lap. “I do not even know who Vivian Hale is.”Marcus studied her closely, then finally softened. “I believe you,” he said. “But someone recommended you for this position through an agency contact who no longer exists. That is not a coincidence.”Julian paced the length of the study, his hands clenched tightly at his sides. “If she planted the nanny herself, that means she has been planning this for weeks, maybe longer,” he said. “Before the wedding even happened.”“That is not the worst pa

Hazel's POV“Your father ruined my mother’s life long before Gerald ever went to prison,” Richard said quietly, staring into his glass instead of at either of us, “and I let it happen because staying silent was easier.”We had gathered Richard into the study the next morning, hoping his decades inside the company might reveal something about why Vivian’s hatred ran so much deeper than her father’s prison sentence alone.“What are you talking about,” Julian asked slowly, setting down his coffee, his eyes narrowing with the particular caution he reserved for family secrets he had not yet braced himself for.Richard finally looked up, and the guilt on his face was old and heavy, the kind that had clearly been carried for far longer than the last twelve years of Gerald’s slow revenge plot.“Before Gerald, there was another partner in the company,” Richard said. “Vivian’s mother, actually. She held nearly a third of our early shares before your father forced her out through a technicality

Hazel's POV“Good evening,” I said into the microphone, my hands steadier than I ever expected them to be, “before we begin tonight’s program, my husband and I have something important to share with all of you.”The theater was full, exactly as Vivian had wanted, every seat filled with donors, reporters, and photographers whose cameras had already begun flashing the moment Julian and I stepped onto the stage together.Julian took the microphone from me gently, his eyes scanning the crowd once before he began speaking, his voice carrying none of the hesitation I knew he must have felt underneath.Before he spoke, I glanced back toward the wings where Grace waited safely with Marisol, far from the cameras and the crowd, and felt a small measure of peace knowing at least this part of the plan had gone exactly right.“Twelve years ago, my father made a decision that destroyed a family who helped build this company from nothing,” he said clearly. “Tonight, we are correcting that record, pu

Hazel's POV“There is nothing else,” Richard said too quickly, his eyes darting toward the study door as though he expected someone else to walk in and rescue him from this exact conversation.We had brought him straight from the gala, still in his formal suit, the three of us gathered in the study while Grace slept peacefully upstairs, blissfully unaware of the storm still swirling downstairs.“Richard,” Julian said, his voice carrying a warning I rarely heard him use with his own father. “Vivian would not have said that without a reason. What else did you bury.”Richard sank into a chair, suddenly looking every one of his years, the confidence from his hospital recovery weeks earlier draining slowly out of him with every passing second of silence.“I need you to understand something before I say the rest,” he said quietly, looking directly at Julian. “I am not telling you this to excuse myself. I am telling you because you deserve the whole truth, finally, after everything this fami