All Chapters of He married me to ruin my husband : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Xavier's phone lit up with fourteen missed calls the moment they got back into cell range, all from Halloran, the last one timestamped less than twenty minutes earlier."Something's wrong," he said, already dialling back. Ivy watched his face change from confusion to concern as Halloran picked up."Where have you been?" Halloran said, loud enough that Ivy caught most of it from the passenger seat. "I've been trying to reach you since midnight.""Dealing with a family emergency. What happened?""A special shareholder meeting's been called. It was filed at eleven last night, with minimum legal notice, and scheduled for nine this morning. A vote of no confidence in your leadership, Xavier. They're asking the board to remove you as CEO."Xavier's knuckles went tight around the phone. "That's not possible without significant shareholder support behind it. Who filed it?""A consortium. Six names, none of them individually significant, but combined they've apparently acquired enough proxy vo

Neither of them slept properly that night, Damian's smile replaying in Ivy's mind every time she closed her eyes."He wasn't even bothered," she said, sitting up around two in the morning, giving up on sleep. "Not even slightly. A man spends weeks engineering a board vote, loses it, and walks out smiling like that's exactly how he wanted it to go.”Xavier sat up beside her, rubbing a hand over his face. "Maybe he had planned it, I mean. Maybe the vote was never actually the goal.""Then what was it for?""A distraction. Who knows? Something big enough to keep all our resources pointed in one direction while he handled something else somewhere we weren't looking." Xavier paused. " Just like the empty compound. We spent all night there while he was busy buying the votes.”Ivy went still. "If the vote was the distraction, what else was he actually doing while we were dealing with it?”"I don't know. I keep running through everything he could still want. Your father, still somewhere we ha

Damian's house sat on quiet acreage two hours outside the city, nothing like the compound they'd raided weeks earlier. This place looked ordinary from the outside, deliberately unremarkable, the kind of property nobody would look at twice.Elena had been there a few days, and in that time she'd learned Damian’s ways carefully. Watching his every move and what he said."You're quiet tonight," Damian said, setting a cup of tea across from her at the small kitchen table."I've been thinking," Elena said."About your brother?""Yeah, about a lot of things." She wrapped her hands around the cup without drinking. "You said, when you first reached out, that you understood what it felt like to be discarded by people who should have valued you. That stuck with me."“And what do you make of it?”“I think there’s some truth to it.” Elena met his eyes. “I’m just not convinced I know the whole story yet.”Genuine interest flickered across Damian's face. "You're sharper than Marcus was. He never on

Elena walked into the penthouse just after ten that night, escorted by two of Ruiz's people, exhausted but unharmed, a small bruise forming on her wrist. Someone had probably gripped her too hard on the way out.She'd been dropped at a gas station two miles from Damian's property, Ruiz explained over the phone, no drama, no struggle, Damian apparently deciding a compromised asset was more trouble to keep."How did Ruiz even find her?" Ivy asked, once the call ended."I called him myself, the second you told me what happened," Xavier said. "I couldn't sit and wait around before she got hurt. So I just reached out to Ruiz, who's already familiar with the area, before we lost any more time." He paused."He tracked the gas stations near the property, checked security footage at each until he found her," Theo added, still on speaker from the car. " That was so simple. I don't think Damian was hiding her then. I guess he was discarding her. Nobody bothers covering their tracks when there's

The marina sat quiet under heavy fog when they arrived Friday evening. Masts clinked softly in the wind. The Cormorant was at slip fourteen, exactly where the recording said it would be.“No movement yet,” Ruiz said quietly over the radio. He was somewhere in the dark with two of his own people. “One guard near the gangway. Could be more below deck...”“Coast Guard's staged two miles out,” Denise said through the earpiece Ivy wore beneath her collar. “They won't move until we confirm the exchange. I need solid proof, not just a boat.”Ivy stood beside Xavier beneath the shadow of a maintenance building. They were both dressed plainly. Her heart hadn't stopped pounding since they arrived.“You remember the signal if something goes wrong?” Xavier asked quietly.“I remember.”She checked the small transmitter clipped to her jacket, the one Theo had insisted on.“I’m gonna be alright, Xavier. I need you to trust that.”“I do. I just care about you, and it makes it hard for me to.”“Xavier