Alle Kapitel von REVENGE IN RED HEELS: Kapitel 41 – Kapitel 47

Marcus's pov "I'll stay," Priya said, already pulling her laptop back out the moment Elena and Ezra left for the hospital. "Someone needs to keep working the Vanessa angle while everyone else is occupied with Alistair. If Cross is already ahead of us on finding her, we can't afford to lose another few hours.""I'll stay too," I said, and something in the way she looked up at that, surprised but pleased, made the decision feel considerably less like duty and more like something I actually wanted, given everything that had almost happened between us the night before.We set up at Elena's kitchen table again, the same surface that had held Vanessa's ultrasound photograph and her frightened, handwritten note only hours earlier, and Priya pulled up the personnel file Grant had quietly shared with her weeks ago, back when we'd first started suspecting Vanessa's connection to Cross ran deeper than anyone wanted to admit."Start with the hiring paperwork," Priya said, sliding half the printe

Marcus's pov I reached her first, my knees hitting the cold ground hard enough to bruise, and for one terrible, suspended second I couldn't tell if the stillness in her body meant the worst thing I could imagine or simply that she'd fainted somewhere along that narrow, rocky path."Vanessa." I pressed two fingers against her throat, relief flooding through me at the faint, unsteady pulse still beating there. "Priya, she's alive, but she's cold, and there's blood near her temple."Priya dropped beside me, already pulling out her phone despite the weak signal, her voice steady in the particular way I'd noticed she got whenever the situation demanded it most. "I'll call for help. You keep her warm, keep talking to her, anything to keep her responsive."I shrugged off my jacket and laid it over Vanessa's shoulders, and to my relief, her eyelids fluttered, a soft, disoriented groan escaping her as consciousness slowly returned."Vanessa, can you hear me? It's Marcus. You're safe now."Her

Ezra's pov The spreadsheet in front of me contained more columns than I had words to describe them, and after twenty minutes of staring at it, I finally admitted defeat and pushed back from the conference table entirely."I don't understand a single line of this," I said, rubbing my eyes. "Grant, I appreciate you trying to walk me through it, but I think we both know I'm currently the least qualified person in this building to be preparing a shareholder defense."Grant, seated across the table with a stack of his own documents, offered a tired but genuine smile. "You're the least qualified person in this building to write the defense. You're not the least qualified person to deliver it. There's a difference, Ezra, and it's the difference that's actually going to matter in four days.""Explain that to me, because right now it feels like the same problem wearing two different names.""A shareholder vote isn't won purely on financial literacy," Grant said, sliding the spreadsheet aside

Damian's pov Grant's office had become something close to a war room over the last three days, papers and folders covering every surface, and I found myself there again that morning, reading through the statement I was supposed to give at the vote, unable to get past the second paragraph without my hands going tight around the page."You're going to have to say it eventually," Grant said, watching me from across the desk. "Not just the parts about Cross. The parts about yourself too. The board needs to hear you acknowledge what actually happened, in your own words, or Cross's allies will use your silence against you.""I know what I need to say, Grant. Knowing it and being able to say it out loud in front of two hundred shareholders are two considerably different things.""Practice, then. On me, if nobody else feels safe enough."I set the page down and looked at him, this man who had spent thirty years quietly managing every crisis this family produced, cleared now of a betrayal th