Todos os capítulos de Ruin of the Sovereign Billionaire : Capítulo 41 - Capítulo 50

Lachlan Vance POVThe post office at the edge of town opened at seven.I was through the door first, paying cash for a priority overnight satchel. I sealed the whistle inside alongside a fresh buccal swab of my own saliva and addressed the package to Thorne's box in St. Kilda.I watched the clerk drop it into the outgoing bin. That was it. The clock had started.An hour later I let myself back into the suite.Callan was at the small dining table, sipping black coffee, laptop open. Two packed duffel bags sat by the door."Where have you been?" His tone struck the exact balance of concern and authority he always managed. "I checked on you an hour ago. Your room was empty.""Walking," I said, stripping off my wet jacket. "Needed air.""You shouldn't be wandering this town, Lachlan." He closed the laptop. "Tahlia's proxy lawyers have frozen the primary accounts. The board's preparing to vote you out in absentia by tomorrow afternoon. We leave in twenty minutes."I walked to the minibar an

Lachlan Vance POVDawn didn't bring sunlight. It brought a bruised, iron-grey fog that rolled in off the Pacific and swallowed the whole town.I hadn't slept. I sat fully dressed in the corner armchair, watching pale light creep through a gap in the blackout curtains, my mind running through the last four years like a case file I'd only now been allowed to actually read.Piece by piece, it came together with a clarity that made my stomach turn. The fake state official who'd taken Toby's hair. Callan insisted on personally handling the sample. His urgency to get me airborne before sunrise, before I had time to think straight.But it went back further than yesterday. If Callan had been willing to forge a paternity test, what else had he built for me?I turned over the night I exiled Kirrily, and this time the shadows in that memory had faces. The digital trail proved she'd stolen the grid patents Callan had produced. The offshore accounts under her maiden name Callan had "discovered" th

Kirrily Archer POVThe cottage's living room sat in total, deliberate darkness. I'd drawn every blind, thrown every deadbolt, and dragged the oak dining table sideways across the front door. The only light came from the encrypted terminal on the desk, its warning banner pulsing red across the walls.I sat hunched over the keyboard, fingers moving faster than felt safe, lines of code reflecting in eyes that hadn't properly closed in two days.CRITICAL ALERT: SYDNEY MEDICAL REGISTRYSTATUS: PATIENT TAHLIA ARCHER JURISDICTION TRANSFER INITIATEDOVERRIDE AUTHORITY: STATE CONSERVATORSHIP PROXYPanic climbed up my throat so fast it nearly choked off my breath.Callan wasn't done with the DNA. He'd moved his lawyers on the medical registry itself, forcing an emergency conservatorship to strip me of Tahlia's medical proxy and hand her over to a facility funded by Bronte's money. If they got control of my sister, they had me by the throat. They'd use her life support as the lever to make me ha

Lachlan Vance POVThe blast hit me like a physical punch. A wall of heat and shattered iron tore through the air as the front gates blew clean off their hinges. The sound was deafening, a deep boom that rattled my teeth and left my ears ringing.I didn't think. My body moved on its own, years of surviving corporate attacks and physical threats kicking in before my brain could catch up. I lunged forward, grabbing Kirrily and pulling her away from the door just as burning metal and broken glass rained down on the porch. We hit the floor hard. My body covered hers completely, my back taking the impact, shielding her from the blast.From the living room, Toby screamed. The sound cut through the ringing in my ears like a knife."Stay down!" I shouted, pressing Kirrily into the floorboards so she couldn't crawl toward the blast zone.I scrambled to my feet, my silver eyes blazing with a fury I had never felt before. Callan had crossed the final line. He wasn't just playing boardroom games a

Lachlan Vance POVThe Sovereign of Martin Place did not do manual labour.I commanded thousands of employees across three continents. I dismantled companies with a single signature. I had assistants whose only job was to manage the temperature of my morning coffee. I hadn't touched a toolbox in my adult life.But as I knelt on the dusty floorboards of the cottage living room, peeling the backing off a rubber corner guard, none of that mattered.I was officially a resident of the Byron Bay cottage. Kirrily had laid down the rules, and I had submitted. But submitting didn't mean sitting in the corner like a useless billionaire. It meant shedding my pride and proving to her, through quiet action, that the tyrant she hated was dead.I pressed the rubber guard onto the sharp corner of the coffee table, holding it for thirty seconds to make sure it stuck.I moved to the next corner, my three-thousand-dollar suit trousers stained with dust and ash. For three hours, I had been childproofing th