Todos los capítulos de A ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH MY EX'S UNCLE : Capítulo 41 - Capítulo 50

It took Gavin five days to build a picture of Dominic Cross solid enough to act on, and what he found did nothing to ease the tight, watchful feeling that had settled over the 50th floor.Cross-Holdings had no public office, no listed employees beyond a skeleton legal filing, and a portfolio of investments that, on paper, looked like nothing more than a wealthy man's quiet diversification. But when Gavin cross-referenced the timing of those investments against six years of Vance Enterprises history, a pattern emerged that made even his usual chaotic energy go quiet and focused: every major crisis the company had weathered — the Apex leak, the compliance frame-up, even, further back, a boardroom dispute Alexander barely remembered — had been preceded, within weeks, by a small, unremarkable Cross-Holdings transaction moving money somewhere adjacent to the trouble."He's not reacting to chaos," Gavin said, laying it out for Alexander and Elena in the locked conference room they'd started

Leo showed up at the Greenwich estate a little after nine at night, unannounced, soaked from a downpour that hadn't been in any forecast, and looking like a man who'd made the decision to come here somewhere around the second time he'd talked himself out of it.Viktor caught him at the gate first — a call up to the main house before anyone let a stranger, even Elena's brother, walk the grounds unescorted. By the time Elena reached the foyer, Leo was standing dripping on the marble, arms crossed tight over his chest, refusing the towel Mrs. Higgins was trying to hand him."Leo. What's wrong?" Elena crossed the floor fast, worry outpacing everything else — the awkwardness between them, the weeks of unanswered calls, all of it forgotten the second she saw his face."Nothing's wrong," he said, in the exact tone of someone for whom everything was wrong. "I just — I needed to see you. And I didn't want to call first because you'd have found some reason to put it off."Behind her, Alexander

Watching a man you might be about to destroy, while treating him exactly the same as any other day, turned out to be one of the harder things Elena had done at Vance Enterprises.Julian Drake ran the mid-level analytics team two floors below her own office — mild-mannered, punctual, the kind of colleague who remembered everyone's coffee order and never once, in over a year, gave her reason to look twice at him. Now she found herself cataloguing every small thing: the way he checked his phone under the conference table during Monday standup, the extra ten minutes he'd started taking at lunch, the new habit of stepping into the stairwell to take calls instead of his own office.None of it was proof of anything. All of it felt, suddenly, like it might be."You're staring," Priya murmured, passing her desk with a stack of files. "At Julian. Third time today.""Am I that obvious?""To me. Probably not to him." Priya set the files down and lowered her voice. "Everything okay?""Just tired,"

"My old firm did quiet consulting work," Julian said, staring at a point somewhere on the table rather than at either of them. "Due diligence, mostly. Legitimate, on paper. About three years in, a client came through who wasn't like the others — careful, generous, patient in a way that should have worried me more than it did at the time.""A name," Alexander said. "Give us a name."Julian's throat worked. "Dominic Cross."Elena felt the name land like something physical, though it meant nothing to her yet beyond the shape of a stranger. Beside her, Alexander had gone very still — not the stillness of surprise, she realized, but the stillness of a man recognizing a shape he'd half expected and dreaded confirming."You know him," she said, looking between them."I know of him," Alexander said carefully. "Reclusive. Private equity, on the surface. There have been — rumors, over the years, about how far his reach actually extends. Nothing anyone's ever been able to prove.""He proved it t

Harrison Vance received them in his study the next morning, still in his robe, a cup of untouched tea going cold at his elbow as Alexander laid out what Gavin had found."Thorncastle Manufacturing," Harrison repeated slowly, the name clearly dredging up something he hadn't thought about in decades. "Yes. I remember it. A small operation, struggling badly by the time we acquired it. I wasn't running the company day-to-day back then — that was still your grandmother's doing, mostly, with my father's blessing. I only came in for the final signatures.""Elias Whitfield," Alexander said. "The name mean anything to you?"Harrison's expression shifted, something old and uncomfortable surfacing. "He ran Thorncastle before us. Proud man. Never forgave the family for what he saw as us picking his company apart at its weakest moment, even though the acquisition kept two hundred jobs from disappearing entirely when the alternative was total collapse." He paused. "There was a boy. A son, I believe