All Chapters of Married to the Cold Billionaire After Betraying Him: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The company boardroom felt different to Damian the morning after his confrontation with Victor not physically, nothing about the space had changed, but something in the way he walked into it had shifted permanently. He'd spent the drive over rehearsing what he needed to say, and by the time he stepped through the doors, his resolve had settled into something steady and unshakeable. He called an emergency meeting with the board's executive committee, five people who had known him since he'd taken over the company, people whose loyalty he'd spent years earning independently of his father's shadow. "I'm formally requesting my father's removal from any active advisory role in company operations," Damian said, setting a folder on the table in front of him not the compliance report, but a separate document outlining Victor's continued interference in personnel and strategic decisions over the past several years. "Effective immediately." The room went quiet. Margaret Chen, the board's l

Amelia had been putting off the visit for weeks, some quiet, unexamined fear keeping her from following through on the idea Nolan had first planted the day they'd discussed her father's business card. But with the ground beneath her and Damian finally feeling steadier, she found herself ready, finally, to seek out the closure she'd been avoiding. "Are you sure about this?" Nolan asked, driving them both out to the quiet suburb where her father's old business partner, a man named Frank Alvarez, had retired years earlier. "You don't have to do this today. Or at all, honestly, if it feels like too much." "I need to," Amelia said, watching the familiar landscape of her childhood slide past the window streets she hadn't driven through in years, a neighborhood that held more memories than she'd realized she still carried. "I spent so long only knowing pieces of my father's story. I want to understand the man behind the business card, behind the compliance report. Not just the innocent by

The countermove, when it finally came, arrived not as a dramatic strike but as something far more insidious a carefully placed story in a respected financial publication, subtle enough to avoid outright libel but pointed enough to do real damage. Amelia read it over breakfast, Damian's tablet propped against the fruit bowl while he took an early call in his study. The headline alone made her stomach drop: *Blackwood Industries' Sudden Leadership Shakeup Raises Questions Among Investors.* The article was careful, professionally written, full of anonymous sources and vague insinuations rather than direct accusations. It painted a picture of a company in turmoil, a young CEO making rash, emotionally-driven decisions, an ousted patriarch whose decades of steady leadership had apparently kept the company stable through market fluctuations that the current leadership might not weather as gracefully. Nowhere did it mention Amelia by name, or the truth about the marriage, or any of the rea

The press release went live at nine in the morning, timed deliberately to coincide with market opening, Damian's legal and communications teams having spent the final hours before dawn triple-checking every word for accuracy and legal soundness. Amelia watched it happen from the kitchen table, coffee growing cold in her hands as she refreshed the news feed on her phone every few minutes, watching the story ripple outward in real time. The headline that emerged across financial outlets was measured, factual: *Blackwood Industries Releases Internal Findings Clearing Former Consultant of Wrongdoing in Decade-Old Corporate Scandal.* It wasn't sensational. It wasn't designed to be. But within hours, follow-up pieces began appearing, digging into the details, connecting dots the original statement had laid out plainly Marcus Delgado's name surfacing again for the first time in years, Meridian Capital's collapse recontextualized as the result of deliberate fraud rather than mere market mi

The private investigator's initial findings arrived a week later, delivered in person rather than over email or phone, Marcus Webb himself sitting across from Amelia and Damian at the dining table with the calm, methodical demeanor of someone who'd spent decades untangling complicated criminal schemes. "I'll give you the short version first, then the details," Webb said, opening a slim folder that seemed almost deceptively thin given the gravity of what he'd apparently uncovered. "Marcus Delgado didn't disappear after Meridian's collapse. He rebuilt, carefully, under a company called Ridgeline Capital Partners, incorporated eight years ago under a business partner's name to keep his own fingerprints off the paperwork. He's been operating in relative obscurity since, mostly small-scale investment fraud nothing large enough to attract major regulatory attention, but consistent enough to suggest he's rebuilt significant personal wealth." "So he's been fine this whole time," Amelia sai