All Chapters of Signed, Sealed, Pregnant by the Ruthless CEO.: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Luna didn't sign it. Not that morning.She'd taken the contract instead — snatched it off the mahogany desk before Ethan Vance could press the pen back into her hand, and walked out of his office with her spine so rigid it ached, past the silver-haired assistant, past the security detail stationed like statues along the corridor, into the elevator where she finally let her knees remember they were shaking. By the time she reached the lobby, she'd stopped trembling. By the time she reached her car, she'd already decided: she would read every clause of this thing before she let it anywhere near her signature. Ethan Vance did not strike her as a man who left anything to chance, which meant the contract in her bag was not a lifeline. It was a leash. She intended to know exactly how long the chain was before she let him fasten it around her throat.She spent the rest of the day locked in her office with the blinds drawn, three cups of black coffee gone cold at her elbow, and Freya perched

The kiss had ended the way all good performances ended — not abruptly, but with a slow, deliberate unwinding, Ethan's mouth lifting from hers by fractions of an inch while the cameras beyond the glass kept firing, capturing every last frame of the aftermath: her flushed cheeks, her parted lips, the way her hand had fisted in the lapel of his jacket without her permission. He'd murmured something about *perfect, exactly what we needed* against her temple, low enough that only she could hear it, and Luna had spent the following twenty minutes trying to convince her own pulse that the ringing in her ears was adrenaline and not something far more dangerous.She excused herself to find the ladies' room sometime after ten, needing five minutes alone with cold water and a mirror to remember who she was supposed to be tonight — Luna Sterling, poised and unbothered, not some woman still feeling the ghost-press of a man's mouth against hers an hour after the fact. The powder room, when she foun

She had said yes.Luna remembered almost nothing of the actual word leaving her mouth — only the roar of relief that had swept through six hundred guests when it did, the priest's booming pronouncement, the eruption of applause that had rattled the stained glass in its two-hundred-year-old frames, Ethan's hand tightening around hers as he'd bent to kiss her a second time, chaste and photographable, nothing like the terrace. She remembered her father weeping openly in the front pew, unashamed for the first time since his accident. She remembered Aria's hand pressed to her own mouth, sobbing happily into Freya's shoulder. She remembered, distantly, the anonymous text still glowing somewhere in the folds of her gown like a coal she hadn't found the nerve to look at again.She did not remember, until the black car pulled beneath the private entrance of Vance Tower's residential floors well past midnight, exactly how she'd gotten from the altar to here — stripped of six hundred witnesses,

The call came at eleven-forty at night, and Luna knew before she'd even answered it that something had gone wrong, because Freya never called this late unless the world had already started burning."Sterling's eastern port," Freya said, breathless, the sound of her own footsteps hurried against pavement audible beneath her voice. "Warehouse four. Fire crews are already there, but Luna — this one's different. Security cut the feed to the main office eight minutes before it started. This wasn't an accident."Luna was already pulling a coat over her sleep clothes before Freya finished the sentence, some old, familiar dread coiling tight in her stomach — the specific, sickening deja vu of standing on wreckage twice in the span of five months, watching her family's legacy reduced to smoke and ash while she scrambled to arrive after the damage was already done.Ethan wasn't home. He'd left the penthouse an hour earlier without explanation, a terse text

Ethan left for Singapore three days after the docks, some emergency summit of Vance Global's regional shipping partners that Luna suspected was at least partly manufactured to put distance between them after the raw, unguarded confessions the wound-cleaning had dragged out of both of them. He'd kissed her goodbye at the door with a careful, deliberate gentleness that felt like an apology neither of them had the vocabulary to voice aloud, murmured something about being back within the week, and left her alone in a penthouse that had never, in the six weeks she'd lived there, felt quite so vast and echoing.*You're getting too close, Luna. It's going to get you killed.*The words had followed her through three sleepless nights, tangled up with the memory of a gun swinging toward her hiding place, of Silas's voice discussing missing shipments in a gala corridor, of Zayn's whispered warning about the night of her father's crash, of an anonymous text still sav