My Alpha Rejected Me Then Discovered I was Billionaire Luna のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

POVI hadn't heard that voice in three years, and it still did the exact same thing to my stomach it always did. Like something cold sliding down the back of my dress."Victor." I kept my own voice light, easy, the way I'd trained myself to talk to him a long time ago, back when I still thought I had room to negotiate with a man like him. "You should have called first.""I don't call first. Not anymore." He shut the car door behind him and came up the porch steps slow, unhurried, taking his time the way rich men always do when they want you to know they're not in any rush on your account. Silver at his temples now that wasn't there three years ago. Same eyes, though. Flat and pale and never quite settling anywhere for long. "I've been getting reports, Rachel. None of them good.""Everything is on schedule.""Is it." He stopped a step below me, close enough that I had to look down at him for once, which I think he hated, and which is exactly why I didn't move. "Because the last report

Nora's POVI didn't sleep. Not really. I sat up most of the night with my back against the headboard, the wrecked room half put back together around me, my mother's broken photo sitting on the nightstand where I could see it.Kade stayed until almost three. Not inside — he made a point of that, said something about not giving Damien or anybody else another reason to talk, and I appreciated it even if some small, tired part of me didn't want him to go at all. He sat on the porch steps instead, just outside the door, and I could hear him out there every time I woke up from the shallow half-sleep I kept sliding in and out of.When the sun finally came up, gray and thin through the curtains, I found him still there, jacket collar turned up against the morning cold, looking like he hadn't slept a minute either."You didn't have to stay all night," I said, opening the door."Wasn't a question of having to." He stood, rolling one shoulder like it had gone stiff. "You okay?""Ask me again in

Kade's POVI got the call from Nora before she'd even finished crossing the yard back to me, her voice coming through fast and clipped, none of the careful calm she usually kept even in a crisis."Kade. I need you at the main hall. Now."I was already moving before she finished the sentence.By the time I got there, the room had the feel of a place that had just taken a hit and hadn't figured out yet how bad the damage was. Elder Morrison stood behind his desk looking a decade older than he had the last time I'd seen him. Damien was pacing, phone still gripped in one hand like he couldn't decide whether to throw it or stare at it some more. And Nora stood near the window with her arms crossed, tight and controlled, the look of a woman doing everything she could not to fall apart in front of people who needed her steady."Show him," she said when she saw me.Damien turned the phone around without a word. I read the message twice, and both times it landed the same ugly way.*You're too

Nora's POVI stood there staring at that photograph, my own face lit up dim and blue from a phone screen, three nights ago, alone in a room I'd thought was the one safe place left to me on this entire property."Who took that," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the only small mercy of the night so far."Does it matter?" Victor slid the phone back into his jacket, unhurried, clearly enjoying exactly how much that image had cost me to see. "The point, Mrs. Cole, is that I've known everything you've been planning for considerably longer than you thought you were being careful. Every call. Every arrangement with our friend from Blackridge here." He nodded toward Kade without a flicker of real fear in his face. "You didn't slip past me. You were never invisible to me at all."Kade's whole body had gone rigid beside me, and I could feel the low, dangerous hum of barely restrained fury radiating off him like heat off pavement."Then it's someone in the pack," I sa

Nora's POV"Absolutely not," Kade said."It wasn't a question.""It should have been." He was already moving toward the car, jaw set, the fire still smoldering behind us casting his face in shifting orange light. "You don't walk into a meeting a scared woman set up an hour after her boss threatened to cut her loose in front of thirty witnesses. That's not caution, Nora, that's the exact kind of trap that gets people killed.""I know that." I followed him, matching his pace. "I also know she hesitated at that car door. I saw her face. That wasn't performance, Kade. I've watched that woman perform for eight months straight and I know the difference now. That was real.""Real fear doesn't mean she's not still working for him. Scared people do desperate things, and sometimes the desperate thing is handing over the person Victor actually wants.""Then come with me.""She said alone.""She said come alone or don't come at all. Doesn't mean you can't be somewhere close enough to move fast if