Semua Bab MARRIED IN HATRED: FELL IN LOVE AFTER SHE LEFT?: Bab 71 - Bab 80

VICTOR'S POVI'd planned nothing elaborate, deliberately, understanding by now exactly what Elena valued and exactly what she didn't. No restaurant reservation with a hidden ring in a dessert. No audience of strangers to perform the moment for. Just the two of us, on the small balcony of the apartment we now shared, a quiet Tuesday evening that looked, to anyone watching, like every other evening we'd spent together over the past several months.I'd carried the ring in my jacket pocket for three days, waiting for a moment that felt right rather than staged, understanding after everything I'd learned from my own history with her that authenticity mattered infinitely more than spectacle.She was watering the small collection of plants she'd started keeping on the balcony railing, something she'd taken up recently, a quiet, patient hobby that suited the version of herself she'd built here, far from the ambition and performance that had once defined her career before Maya destroyed it."Y

REBECCA'S POVThe call came at six in the morning from our quality assurance director, her voice tight with barely controlled panic, informing me that a recent batch of our flagship supplement line had failed independent lab testing, contamination levels exceeding safety thresholds by a margin too significant to dismiss as a measurement error.I sat up in bed immediately, old instinct rushing forward before I could stop it, the familiar reflex toward containment, toward managing the story before it could spread, toward protecting the family's reputation above all other considerations.I caught myself within seconds, understanding exactly how dangerous that old reflex actually was, how many times over the decades it had cost more than it ever protected."How many units are affected," I asked instead, forcing myself toward the actual, practical question rather than the reputational one."Roughly four thousand units," she said. "Already shipped to retailers across twelve states. We caugh

HAILEY'S POVI changed my shirt four times before settling on the third one again, which felt like a small, humiliating admission that I cared more about tonight than I wanted to.Marcus stood in the doorway of my apartment, patient in a way that had stopped surprising me weeks ago, watching me straighten a collar that didn't need straightening. "You know they're going to like me," he said. "I've met plenty of intimidating people before.""Not like this," I said. "My mother built an empire out of reading people before they finished a sentence. My brother interrogates anyone I bring near this family like he's screening a hostile witness. And my grandmother has opinions about everyone, usually correct ones, which is somehow worse.""So basically dinner with royalty.""Basically dinner with people who love me enough to make this difficult," I said, and meant it more than I expected to.The drive to the house felt longer than it actually was. I kept glancing at Marcus at red lights, catal

JAKE'S POVI called a meeting with my three senior deputies the morning after we got home from the hospital, laid out the situation plainly, and told them I needed to restructure how much of Apex ran through me directly for the remainder of Jolene's pregnancy."How much are we talking," Marcus Chen asked, careful in the way people got careful when they weren't sure how much authority they were actually being handed."Most of it," I said. "Daily operations, vendor negotiations, the acquisitions pipeline. I want final sign-off on anything over a certain threshold, and I want to be looped in on major decisions. Everything else, I need you three running without waiting for me to weigh in first."There was a pause around the table, the kind of pause that told me exactly how unusual this request actually was coming from me."You've never delegated like this before," Chen said, not unkindly, just honest."I know," I said. "I built this company believing I had to control every piece of it to

VICTOR'S POVElena spread the venue photos across our kitchen table with the specific focus she brought to everything she cared about, three options narrowed down from what had originally been an overwhelming twelve."Small," she said again, tapping the photo of the garden space we both kept returning to. "Intimate. I don't want three hundred people watching us eat cake who barely know either of us.""Agreed completely," I said. "Fifty people, tops. People who actually matter.""Your family's going to be most of that fifty.""Our family," I corrected, and watched her smile at that, small and pleased, the word still new enough between us to carry weight every time I used it.We'd been engaged for four months, and the planning had unfolded easily, none of the friction I'd half expected given how different our instincts sometimes ran. Elena wanted meaning over spectacle at every turn, and it turned out I wanted exactly the same thing, a preference I hadn't fully known I held until I had