Início / Romance / The Billionaire's Secret Bride / Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

Todos os capítulos de The Billionaire's Secret Bride: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

470 Capítulos

chapter 11

Point of View: Elena"You're not going to fall through that skylight and die before opening day," Priya said, climbing over a fallen beam with two coffees balanced carefully in her hands, the moment she found me standing in the dust and broken light. "I forbid it. Too much paperwork for me."I stood inside the Delancey Theater with dust falling through a broken skylight like slow snow, my mother's blueprints spread across a folding table I had smuggled in myself, and tried to convince my racing heart that the text messages meant nothing at all. The building held a particular kind of silence, the kind that comes from decades of nobody speaking inside it, and every footstep I took across the warped floorboards echoed back at me twice, once from the empty seats and once from the domed ceiling somewhere above the broken chandelier that had not held a bulb since before I was born.I had loved this building since I was eight years old, dragged here by my mother on a Sunday when she was supp

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 12

Point of View: Alexander"We need to talk," Elena said, closing my office door behind her with more force than necessary. "About a masked gala. About a compass rose. About whatever it is you and everyone around you seem to know except me."Daniel's news had sat in my chest like a stone all afternoon, a name I was not ready to say out loud to anyone, sitting through two board calls and a lunch I barely tasted while it turned over and over behind my eyes. I had kept my office door closed longer than usual that day, staring at the skyline instead of my inbox, and I was still turning it over when she walked in that evening without knocking, her expression carrying a storm I recognized because I had been quietly living inside my own version of it for hours.My pulse did something complicated and fast. "Where did you hear about that.""Marcus. In person. In a theater he apparently now owns the lien to, which is a separate horror I'll get to in a moment." She crossed her arms, and beneath th

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 13

Point of View: Elena"Your dad collapsed. The ambulance is already on the way." Priya's voice cracked over the phone before I even managed a hello, and I was out the door before she finished the sentence, briefcase and coat abandoned on my chair at the lighting contractor's office where I had been sitting only seconds earlier.I do not remember the cab ride to the hospital. I remember only fragments, rain streaking the window, my own reflection pale and unfamiliar in the glass, the driver asking twice if I was alright before I finally answered him.The hospital smelled like every hospital I had ever hated, antiseptic and fear layered over fluorescent light, and I found him propped up in a bed two sizes too big for how small he suddenly looked, a heart monitor tracing his pulse in small green mountains across a black screen. "Stress," the doctor called it, though we both knew stress was just a polite word for years of watching a company he loved slowly bleed out under his hands."You d

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 14

Point of View: Alexander"Forgive the short notice," Marcus said, not sounding sorry at all, the moment I took my seat at the long glass table. "New information has come to light regarding the circumstances of my cousin's marriage, and I felt the board deserved transparency before we proceed with quarterly business."Marcus had called an emergency board session eight days earlier than protocol allowed, and I knew before I even sat down that whatever he intended to say had been engineered specifically to hurt me in front of the people whose votes mattered most. Daniel had warned me an hour beforehand that Marcus's assistant had spent the morning printing bound folders for every board member, a detail small enough to seem irrelevant and large enough, in my experience of my cousin, to mean he had built an entire narrative he intended to hand out like a verdict already reached. I had walked into the room already braced, the way I had learned to brace for every meeting Marcus called on sho

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 15

Point of View: Elena"Read it to me exactly as written," Alexander said, voice gone flat in the particular way I now recognized as fear wearing his usual armor, phone pressed hard to his ear as we stood in the lobby.Alexander had answered the phone with my hand still curled into his jacket, and whatever Daniel said on the other end drained the color from his face so fast that I gripped the fabric tighter without meaning to, bracing for both of us. The security guard near the front desk glanced our way once and then quickly looked back down at his monitors, the way people always did when they sensed a conversation had turned into something they were not supposed to witness. A long pause followed, Daniel's voice a thin murmur I could not make out, and I watched my husband's jaw tighten and release, tighten and release, like a man absorbing blows he refused to let show on his face in a public lobby."Thank you," he said finally, and hung up."Tell me," I said, before he could decide to

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 16

Point of View: Alexander"Who sent you this," I asked, the moment I saw her face change, some part of me already suspecting the answer before the words finished leaving my mouth.I had watched Elena's face change as she read whatever glowed on her phone screen, and some old animal instinct in me knew before she even turned it toward me that the next few minutes would decide whether we survived each other or not. The lobby around us had emptied further, the night shift receptionist absorbed in something on her own screen, the elevators standing open and unused, and for a moment it felt like the entire building was holding its breath along with us."I don't know. The same number that told me about the gala, and about you never stopping your search for the woman in the green dress. This time it's about Claire." She held the phone out, her hand steadier than her voice. "It says you know the truth about what happened to her. That it's not what everyone believes."The elevator lobby around

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 17

Point of View: Elena"You're not writing my name," Alexander said, watching me from across the low table, and I felt the accusation underneath the observation even though his voice stayed perfectly even.Someone who had touched both our lives long enough to know about a masked gala, a dead sister, and a theater I had told almost no one about was still walking free inside our house, and that single, unbearable fact had kept me awake long after Alexander had finally drifted off beside me. I gave up on sleep entirely a little after two, pulled on his discarded sweater because it was closer than my own robe, and carried a legal pad down to the study, the kind of pad I used to sketch load bearing walls on. Instead of blueprints, I wrote names. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs behind me twenty minutes later, I did not turn around."I don't need to," I said, finally answering him, my pen still moving. "You'd have no reason to blackmail yourself."He settled into the chair across from

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 18

Point of View: Alexander"Before we begin," Marcus said, standing without being asked, "I think everyone deserves to know why our CEO's marriage was arranged so conveniently fast, and why his new wife happens to be a blood relative, however distant, thanks to a rather colorful chapter in our grandmother's past."The emergency board meeting had been called on two hours' notice, which told me Marcus had planned this for weeks and only pulled the trigger once he knew I was distracted enough not to see it coming. I sat at the head of the table with Elena's message still burning behind my eyes, R for Renee, a single line that read only, you should have let me keep my job, and forced my face into the flat, unreadable calm that had carried me through a decade of hostile takeovers and worse mornings than this one. Daniel sat two seats down, a folder in front of him I had not yet had time to read, his expression giving away nothing to the room but everything to me. Twelve board members filled

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 19

Point of View: Elena"Marcus said you're hiding something," I said, sitting down across from my father at the kitchen table where I had done homework as a child, keeping my voice as level as I could manage despite the dread climbing up my throat.My father's hands were shaking around his coffee cup, and I knew before he said a single word that whatever Marcus meant in that boardroom was about to rearrange everything I thought I understood about my own family. I had driven straight from Alexander's call to the old house, the one with the crooked porch light he never got around to fixing, and found my father exactly where I expected him, a stack of papers in front of him that he tried and failed to hide the moment I walked through the door. Priya had offered to come with me and I had said no, some part of me already sensing this was a conversation that belonged only to the two of us, no witnesses, no cushioning."Something about the debt," I pressed, when he didn't answer right away. "S

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

chapter 20

Point of View: Alexander"How long has it been recording," I asked, my voice coming out rougher than I intended as I stared at the small black lens sitting in Daniel's gloved palm like something venomous.Marisol had found it tucked inside a bookshelf facing Elena's drafting table, angled precisely enough that whoever installed it wanted more than casual surveillance, they wanted her blueprints, her sketches for Delancey Theater, every unguarded conversation she had ever had with Priya over speakerphone while she worked late into the night. I stood in the doorway of the studio with my hands clenched at my sides, rage moving through me clean and cold in a way I had not felt since the week Claire died, and thought of every private word I had said to Elena in this house, believing the walls were finally, finally safe enough to hold them."Based on the battery drain, at least six weeks," Daniel said, bagging the device carefully, his own jaw tight with the particular fury of a man who too

Última atualização : 2026-09-01

ANTERIOR

...

PRÓXIMO

ESCANEIE O CÓDIGO PARA LER NO APP

DMCA.com Protection Status