All Chapters of Married to the Cold Billionaire After Betraying Him: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Amelia carried the business card around for three days before she worked up the nerve to do anything about it, tucked into the inside pocket of her bag like a secret she wasn't ready to look at too closely. In the end, it was Patricia Yoon she called, not Damian. It felt like the safer choice a professional relationship, someone who'd known her father, someone who might be able to answer questions without the weight of everything else tangled up in the asking. "Amelia." Patricia sounded pleased to hear from her, warmth in her voice that hadn't been there during their last, more businesslike meeting. "How's married life treating you?" "Better than I expected, honestly." Amelia hesitated, turning the card over in her fingers. "Patricia, can I ask you something about my dad? Something from before he passed?" "Of course. Anything." "Did he ever work with Blackwood Industries? Directly, I mean. Not just in the industry generally." There was a pause on the other end of the line,

It started, as these things often do, with something small and seemingly harmless a photograph. Amelia was scrolling through her phone one quiet afternoon when Nolan sent her a link with no explanation beyond a single line of text: *Have you seen this?* She clicked it, and her stomach dropped. It was a gossip site, one of the smaller ones that thrived on speculation rather than fact, running a story under a headline that made her flinch: *Trouble in Paradise? Blackwood Bride Spotted Leaving Family Lawyer's Office Alone.* Beneath it was a grainy photograph of her walking out of Patricia's building the week before, taken from across the street, her expression unreadable in the low resolution. The article was thin on actual information and thick on innuendo, speculating about prenuptial disputes, secret negotiations, whispers of a marriage already crumbling less than two months in. Amelia's hands were shaking slightly by the time she finished reading it. She called Damian immediat

The name Marcus Delgado followed Amelia around for days after that night in the hospital cafeteria, turning over in her mind at odd moments while she was making tea, while she was sitting with her mother during recovery, while she lay awake beside Damian long after he'd fallen asleep. She wasn't the only one who couldn't let it go. Damian threw himself into quiet research over the following week, careful not to alert his father or anyone else at the company to what he was doing, working late into the evenings on something he wouldn't fully explain until he had more concrete answers. "I found some old news articles," he told her one night, spreading a small stack of printouts across the dining table. "Delgado ran a firm called Meridian Capital, years ago. Direct competitor to Blackwood Industries for a while, until it collapsed almost overnight. There were rumors of fraud, though nothing was ever proven. He disappeared from the business world not long after." Amelia leaned over th

The storage facility sat on the outskirts of the city, an unremarkable brick building among rows of identical warehouses, the kind of place no one would look twice at unless they knew exactly what they were searching for. Damian had arranged access through a records manager who didn't ask questions, the kind of quiet favor that came from years of careful relationship-building within his own company. "This is it," he said, pulling into a parking spot near a side entrance, glancing around out of habit before they got out of the car. "Compliance archives, boxes organized by year. If the follow-up report exists, it should be somewhere in the section from that period." Inside, the facility was exactly as unglamorous as Amelia had expected rows of metal shelving stretching back into dim, fluorescent-lit distance, boxes labeled with faded marker in a system that made sense to whoever had organized it years earlier and to no one since. Damian led her through the maze with a kind of grim de

Amelia spent the next two days in a strange, suspended state, moving through the penthouse like a ghost in her own life, unable to fully settle into anger or grief or relief, cycling instead through all three in exhausting, unpredictable waves. Damian gave her the space she'd asked for, though she noticed the careful, constant awareness of him even from a distance the way he made sure she had coffee in the morning without hovering, the way he left before she woke and came home later than usual, giving her rooms to breathe in without the weight of his presence pressing against her thoughts. It was, she recognized, its own kind of care, even if it ached in a different way than his usual closeness did. She called Nolan on the second day, unable to hold the weight of it alone any longer. "He engineered the whole thing," she said, the words still strange and unbelievable in her own mouth even after saying them twice already. "Victor Blackwood arranged for Patricia to find me. He wante