All Chapters of The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

HaleDorian Hale had survived two wars, one divorce, and three attempts on his employer's life, and he could not remember a night that had felt as much like drowning as this one.He sat alone in the forensic suite on the thirty-second floor of Vanguard Tower, a windowless room that smelled of cold coffee and ozone, with three monitors glowing before him like the eyes of a patient animal. The clock above the door read ten minutes past four. His telephone lay face-up beside the keyboard, and it showed fourteen unanswered calls to Travis Vanguard. He had left his employer standing in the middle of a country road beside Whitcombe Cemetery at ten o'clock the previous evening, because Travis had ordered him to go, and Hale had obeyed because disobedience in that moment would have broken something that could not be repaired.The call that had dragged him back to the tower had come at 3:10 in the morning, not from Travis but from Tokyo. Mr. Kuroda, the elderly chairman of the Kuroda-Shinmei G

HaleDorian Hale had survived two wars, one divorce, and three attempts on his employer's life, and he could not remember a night that had felt as much like drowning as this one.He sat alone in the forensic suite on the thirty-second floor of Vanguard Tower, a windowless room that smelled of cold coffee and ozone, with three monitors glowing before him like the eyes of a patient animal. The clock above the door read ten minutes past four. His telephone lay face-up beside the keyboard, and it showed fourteen unanswered calls to Travis Vanguard. He had left his employer standing in the middle of a country road beside Whitcombe Cemetery at ten o'clock the previous evening, because Travis had ordered him to go, and Hale had obeyed because disobedience in that moment would have broken something that could not be repaired.The call that had dragged him back to the tower had come at 3:10 in the morning, not from Travis but from Tokyo. Mr. Kuroda, the elderly chairman

IsabellaThey moved me to a smaller room on the same floor, a windowless chamber with a single table and two chairs, and they called it a consultation.The recording had played twice more before the directors voted, eleven to three, to refer the matter to independent counsel pending a full inquiry. Travis had cast one of the three dissenting votes in a voice like frozen iron, but he had said nothing to me afterward and had walked out of the boardroom without turning his head. Hale had tried to follow me down the corridor, and two security men I did not recognise had stepped across his path with apologetic smiles. I had watched him over their shoulders mouthing a single word that I could not read.The lawyer who entered the little room at ten o'clock was a woman of perhaps fifty, tall and spare, with iron-grey hair cut close to her skull and a grey wool suit that looked as though it had been cut with a ruler. She introduced herself as Cassandra Thorne of Thorne W

ScottThe Ashbourne family had employed the same firm of solicitors since the reign of George the Third, and its senior partner, Bartholomew Finch, had the manner of a man who regarded every client as a delicate piece of porcelain.I led Isabella into his chambers off Chancery Lane at eight that evening, through a door that bore no brass plate and a hall that smelled of beeswax and ancient paper. She had telephoned me from a phone box near the penthouse after leaving the tower, and her voice had been so low and so careful that I had put down my glass of whisky without finishing it and gone for the car. I had asked her no questions on the drive, because she sat with her hands knotted in her lap and her gaze fixed on the wet streets, and I had understood that she needed silence more than she needed comfort.Finch received us in a panelled room lit by green-shaded lamps, and he took her hand in both of his with a bow that belonged to another century. He was seventy and plump, with a pink

IsabellaThe French doors had been left open a few inches to let the warmth of the room escape into the garden, and every sound inside carried across the wet grass as clearly as if I had been standing among them.I pressed myself against the clipped hedge with my pulse hammering in my throat, and I made myself breathe through my nose, slowly, the way Sister Agnes had taught me when I was small. Scott crouched at my shoulder with his body angled to shield me from the light, and I could feel the heat of him through my coat. Neither of us moved, and neither of us spoke, because the room before us held a scene that I had been rehearsing in nightmares since the day I walked out of the Moore house.Eliana lowered herself onto a velvet sofa with the care of someone made of glass, and she arranged a cushion behind her back. Leilana had flung off her white coat and was pacing before the fireplace with a glass of wine in her fist, her heels striking the polished boards in a quick and nervous rh