All Chapters of MY HUSBAND'S BILLIONAIRE RIVAL: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

Chapter One: Flour and DebtThe oven timer buzzed for the third time that morning, and Elena Rossi still hadn't moved.Flour dusted her forearms like pale ash, settling into the creases of her knuckles as she worked the dough beneath her palms — fold, press, turn, fold again. It was the only part of her day that still felt like hers. Everything else belonged to someone else now: the landlord who raised her rent every spring, the hospital billing department that called every Tuesday like clockwork, the ghost of a name she used to carry like a crown and now carried like a stone.Rossi.Once, it had meant runway shows in Milan and her father's face on the cover of business magazines. Now it meant the woman at the pharmacy counter pretending not to recognize her, and a bakery the size of a walk-in closet on a street nobody important ever walked down.She liked it better this way. She told herself that every morning, and some mornings she almost believed it.The bell over the door chimed,

Chapter Three: Signing Her Life AwayThe folder sat on Elena's nightstand for six hours before she opened it.She'd told herself she wouldn't — that she'd sleep on it properly, wake up with a clear head, make the decision like a rational adult instead of a woman running on fear and four hours of sleep. Instead, at two in the morning, she gave up pretending and switched on the lamp.The contract inside was thicker than she expected. Forty pages, dense with legal language, clauses within clauses, the kind of document designed to be skimmed by people too tired or too desperate to read every line. Elena read every line anyway. Her father had taught her that, long before his company collapsed and his name became something people said with a wince instead of respect: never sign anything you haven't read twice.Some of it was exactly what Damian had described. Twelve months. Public appearances — galas, dinners, the occasional press photo, all choreographed to project the image of a stable, h

Chapter Five: Moving Into the Ice CastleThe penthouse took up the entire fortieth floor, and it didn't feel like a home so much as a museum built for a man who didn't particularly want visitors.Elena stood in the foyer at nine that evening, still half-dressed in the traveling clothes she'd changed into after the reception, watching movers in black uniforms carry the last of her boxes past floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked half the city. Everything in the space was pale stone and glass and hard, clean lines — beautiful in the way a knife was beautiful, all function and no softness."This way." Damian's assistant, a soft-spoken woman named Priya who'd clearly been given very specific instructions, led her down a wide hallway lined with art Elena didn't recognize but suspected cost more than her old family home. "Mr. Vance had the east wing prepared for you."The east wing. As though this were a manor house from a period drama and not a billionaire's penthouse with more square f