All Chapters of I'm The Thorn Stuck In The Billionaire Celebrity's Foot: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The hospital corridor at eleven at night had a particular kind of quiet that Ivy had learned to hate, the low hum of machines and rubber-soled shoes and nothing else, the sound of a building holding its breath.Her mother's nurse met her at the nurses' station, face carefully arranged into the kind of calm that meant something had gone wrong and someone had decided Ivy needed to hear it gently."What happened," Ivy said, not waiting for the gentle version."Your mother's oxygen dropped sharply around eight tonight. We got her stabilized, but her usual medication, the one that's been keeping her heart rhythm steady, wasn't available in the pharmacy tonight. There was some issue with the authorization on file." The nurse's eyes flicked, just briefly, toward Sterling standing a step behind Ivy. "We had to substitute something less effective until we could sort it out."Ivy's whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the hospital air conditioning."Sort it out how.""It's

Reagan's office at midnight looked worse than it had the night before, every light on, three assistants Ivy hadn't met working phones in the outer room, the whole floor humming with the particular tension of people trying to stop a fire before it reached the roof."Someone on my team leaked it," Reagan said, no preamble, the moment they walked in. "The contract language is specific enough, our internal formatting, our clause numbering, that it didn't come from your lawyer, Ivy, and it didn't come from mine. It came from inside this building.""Who," Sterling said, voice flat and dangerous."I don't know yet. I've got four people with access to that document. I'm running it down." Reagan's hands were steady on her tablet, but her voice had an edge Ivy hadn't heard from her before, something almost like fear. "In the meantime we need a plan for the morning that doesn't involve either of you looking like you're hiding something, because if this breaks with silence from our side, silence

Nobody slept. Reagan's office turned into a war room in earnest, whiteboards wheeled in, three lawyers on speakerphone from different time zones, and somewhere around three in the morning Ivy found herself standing at the window with a cold cup of coffee, watching the city lights blur into something that looked almost peaceful from this high up.Sterling found her there."You should go home. Sleep. You have the interview at eight." He said it gently, none of the command from earlier in the night."I'm not going to sleep tonight either way. Might as well not do it here, surrounded by people rehearsing talking points." Ivy didn't turn from the window. "Can I ask you something.""Anything.""Are you scared? Of tomorrow, of the vote, of losing the company your whole life's built around." She finally looked at him. "Because I keep watching you handle all of this like a problem to be solved, and I don't know if that's actually how you feel or just how you've learned to survive feeling anyth

Ivy watched the press conference from her phone in the prison parking lot, the video quality grainy, Julian Vane's voice tinny through the small speaker but unmistakable, that same easy, terrible confidence he'd worn in the diner."There have been questions," Julian was saying, standing at a podium flanked by two lawyers Ivy didn't recognize, "about my son's judgment lately. About decisions made under significant emotional strain following the collapse of his engagement. I want to address those questions directly, and honestly, because this company deserves transparency from its leadership.""Here it comes," Ivy muttered, hands shaking around the phone."Six days ago, Sterling Vane entered into a paid relationship with a woman named Ivy Calloway, a building services employee, in what internal documents confirm was a calculated public relations strategy designed to manufacture sympathy following his broken engagement." Julian's voice was smooth, reasonable, devastating in its calm. "I

Ivy went back to her apartment that night for the first time in three days, exhausted past the point of thought, and found herself standing in front of the small box she'd never fully unpacked from her father's arrest, the one she'd shoved into her closet six years ago and never opened since.She almost didn't open it now. But something about the day, about her father's bruised face and Webb's shaking hands and Julian's smooth, terrible voice at the podium, made her finally pull it down and sit with it on her bedroom floor.Old letters. A watch that had stopped working years ago. And near the bottom, a small notebook she didn't remember, her father's handwriting cramped and hurried across the pages, dated the month before his arrest.She read for an hour, heart pounding harder with every page, and by the time she reached the final entries, her hands were shaking so badly she had to set the notebook down twice to steady them.Numbers. Account names. A list of transfers her father had a