All Chapters of BOUND TO THE BILLIONAIRE’S CONTRACT : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

I am just going to say it—Julian was a moron. Like, an actual, certified, room-temperature-IQ idiot. I was sitting on the freezing cold marble floor of the master bathroom closet at one in the morning, staring at the glowing screen of the burner phone I had shoved down my bra six hours earlier. My entire body was shaking so violently that I was actually rattling against the wooden shoe racks. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the white numbers floating in the top right corner of the Grand Cayman Financial app. $17,450,000.00. Seventeen. Million. Dollars. I literally thought I was having an aneurysm. I squeezed my eyes shut, rubbed them hard enough to see stars, and looked at the screen again. The numbers were still there. My husband, the man who used to complain about the price of oat milk lattes at our local Brooklyn coffee shop, had seventeen million dollars sitting in a digital vault in the Caribbean. And he protected it with a password a bored fifth-grader could have gues

I don’t know how long I stood there gripping the edge of the marble sink.Ten minutes? An hour? A fiscal quarter?My fingers were locked so tightly around the edge of the counter that I genuinely thought the bones in my knuckles were going to snap through my skin. My lungs forgot how to process oxygen. All I could hear was a high-pitched ringing, like someone had set off a flashbang directly inside my skull.*Trace the IP address.*I watch enough Netflix true-crime docs to know exactly how this works. You don’t need to be a hacker in a dark basement typing in green code to understand that a network ping is basically a digital GPS tracker.Alexander’s tech guys were going to pull the server logs from the Cayman bank. They were going to trace the connection back to the cellular tower in Manhattan. Then they were going to triangulate the signal, isolate the device’s unique ID, and follow it straight to the burner phone currently resting against Alexander Vance’s left thigh.I was a d

The elevator dropped. My stomach stayed somewhere around the fiftieth floor. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a freight elevator plummeting down the spine of a Manhattan skyscraper while standing next to a bleeding mafia boss, but I highly recommend giving it a zero out of ten. The hum of the cables vibrating through the metal floor was the only sound in the tiny, claustrophobic box. I was pressing myself so hard into the back corner I was practically trying to merge with the steel wall. Alexander was leaning against the opposite side, staring at the digital floor indicator counting down like a literal ticking bomb. 50... 40... 30... He looked terrible. Like, actually terrifyingly bad. His white dress shirt was completely ruined, the left side clinging wetly to his ribs where he’d ripped his stitches wide open tackling me. He was breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling in these jagged, uneven completely un-Alexander-like intervals. But his eyes? His eyes were pure,

I didn’t sleep. Like, at all. I spent the entire night huddled on the extreme right edge of the massive king-sized bed, clutching the duvet to my chin and staring at the dark ceiling. Every single time the upstate wind slammed against the glass, or a floorboard randomly settled somewhere down the hall, I practically had a heart attack. I was running purely on adrenaline and iced-coffee-level anxiety. Dante Rossi—the absolute psychopath who wanted me dead—was literally coming over for breakfast. By the time the sun finally started creeping through the giant windows, painting the room in this miserable, freezing gray light, my nerves were completely fried. I felt like a live wire. I sat up and pulled the heavy blanket around my shoulders like a shield. I stared at the antique velvet armchair in the corner. It looked totally innocent. Nobody would ever look at it and guess there was a stolen mafia burner phone zipped inside the seat cushion, holding the digital footprint of a sevent

Viktor’s hand clamped around my bicep like a literal vice grip. I didn’t even try to fight him. Honestly, I couldn't have if I tried. My legs had turned into actual jello, and if he wasn't holding me up, I probably would have collapsed right there on the freezing marble floor. Nobody said a word. The twelve tactical guards just stood there, completely silent, watching me get hauled away like I was a traitor walking to the gallows. I looked over my shoulder, desperately trying to catch Alexander’s eye. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t trying to talk to Rossi. I was literally trying to rob him. But Alexander had already turned his back to me. He was staring at the heavy wooden doors of the dining hall, his massive shoulders rigid, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. The complete and total dismissal in his posture hit me harder than a physical slap. "Keep moving," Viktor rumbled quietly. His voice wasn’t angry, which somehow made it ten times worse. It was ju