Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 21 - Chapitre 30

Ace's POVEthan was still breathing hard when he found his voice again, staring past me at Natasha like I'd stopped existing entirely."Do you actually like him Nat. This bastard?" His voice cracked on it, raw in a way that made the small crowd gathered near the front desk go very still. "Or are you just doing this to hurt me, Nat? Because I need to know. I need you to actually say it."I watched her.She didn't look at Ethan. She didn't look at me either, not right away — she looked at the room instead, at Priya frozen mid-step by her desk, at two junior planners who'd stopped pretending not to watch, at the security guard still holding position a foot from Ethan's shoulder. A dozen people, all of them waiting, the whole office gone hungrily, expectantly silent in that specific way rooms go quiet right before something happens that everyone's going to be talking about tomorrow.She said nothing.I opened my mouth, already reaching for the line, the smooth redirect I'd used a hundred

Marcus's POV I'd told myself, that first night I found the forum thread, that I wasn't going to dig any further without a reason. I had a reason now. Ace had been different since the car — quieter in a specific way I recognized, the particular stillness of a man who'd said something out loud he hadn't meant to say, and then spent the following week trying to decide whether he regretted it. He hadn't told me anything directly. He didn't need to. Six years of reading a man's silences taught you to hear the shape of what he wasn't saying almost as clearly as what he was, and what I was hearing now, underneath the usual boardroom composure, was a single word rattling around behind his ribs. Vivienne. I started where I should have started the first time, if I'd actually understood what I was looking for back then — not gossip forums and cached obituaries, but the boring, unglamorous paper trail every real story eventually leaves behind if you're patient enough and willing to spend

Noel's POV The lounge didn't advertise itself. That was the entire point of a place like this — no sign out front, just a discreet brass number on an unmarked door in a part of the city where the buildings themselves had stopped bothering to announce what they were worth, because everyone who mattered already knew. I'd chosen it deliberately. Cassandra Harrington had a standing table here on Thursdays, had for years, and I'd learned enough about her by now to know she'd never once cancelled it, not even the week her own wedding collapsed on live television in front of four hundred people. Some habits survive humiliation. Hers clearly had. She looked up when I sat down across from her, uninvited, and I watched the exact half-second calculation move behind her eyes — recognition, then something colder, sharper, considerably more interested than offended. Hair neatly styled in a high sleek ponytail. "You've got nerve," she said, already removing her sunglasses. "I've got somet

Richard Voss's POV Fifteen years. That was how long I'd been sitting on that board, watching Julian Stone run Stone Industries like a monarchy dressed up in quarterly reports, and fifteen years was a long time to sit on a resentment before it stopped feeling like ambition and started feeling like something closer to a debt owed. Twice. He'd passed me over twice. The first time, fifteen years ago, I told myself it made sense — I was younger then, greener, and Julian had a point buried somewhere in his refusal, even if he'd delivered it with all the warmth of a man declining a subordinate's expense report. The second time, eleven years ago, with a resume that could have papered the walls of that boardroom twice over, he hadn't even bothered with a real explanation. He'd simply announced, over coffee, in that flat, unbothered voice of his, that Ace was ready. Ace. Still cutting his teeth on mid-tier acquisitions at the time, and Julian had looked me dead in the eye and cal

Natasha's POV I didn't remember the date on purpose. That was the strange, unfair part of it — I hadn't been counting down to it, hadn't circled it on any calendar, and yet some quiet, stubborn part of my body kept its own private ledger regardless, and it woke me up that morning already aching before my conscious mind had caught up to why. Three years, five months. Today would have marked three years, five months since Ethan and I started dating, back when that kind of time still felt like the beginning of something instead of the whole shape of what it was going to be. It wasn't until I was halfway through my second cup of coffee that the rest of it actually landed, cold and strange, like a door opening onto a room I hadn't known was there. Five months ago, to the exact day, I'd sat in a locked groom's lounge and signed my name to a contract that made me Ace Stone's wife. I hadn't chosen that date. Nobody had planned it, not me, not Ace, not some universe with a sense of hum