Semua Bab Divorced by my Billionaire Ex, Now He Wants Me Back! : Bab 151 - Bab 160

150Alex.The morning sunlight came in weakly through the blinds, painting stripes across the floor, but I barely noticed it. My mind had been running ahead of me all night, plotting, calculating, imagining possibilities I wasn’t sure I wanted to consider. Even in my own house, I felt exposed, as if the walls themselves couldn’t protect us.Marcus, my PI, had been pacing the study for over an hour when I entered, tablet in hand. Every line of his face was tense, and I could feel his gaze on me, silent but heavy.“Alex,” he began, stopping mid-step, “I’ve been analyzing everything we know so far. Whoever is behind this isn’t acting randomly. They have access to information that isn’t public. That’s point one. And point two—” He tapped the screen, illuminating a series of notes, diagrams, and timelines. “Someone inside your circle is feeding them information, or at least someone very close to it.”The thought didn’t shock me. My mind immediately went to Dane. The man had always been at

152Stella.The morning slipped in quietly, the kind of soft grey that didn’t belong to any particular weather yet. I woke before the alarm, before the guards shifted outside, before the house made its usual creaks and sighs. Something felt off. Not wrong, just… muted. Like the air itself held its breath.I found Emma sitting at the kitchen island with her chin in her palm, staring at her cereal as if it had betrayed her. Eli sat beside her, legs swinging, his spoon untouched. Normally they were chatterboxes in the morning—competing for who had the funniest dream, asking when they could go to the park again, or teasing me about something I said while half-asleep. But today, they looked like smaller versions of themselves. Dimmed.I set my mug down and leaned against the marble counter. “You two are quiet.”Emma shrugged without looking up. Eli did too, a half-second behind her, as if he wasn’t sure what he wanted to feel yet.I came around the island, brushing a hand over Eli’s hair.

154Stella.I don’t think I’ve ever held anything as tightly as I held Emma and Eli the moment I saw them standing there on the porch, small and confused and clutching those strange stuffed animals like they’d just come back from a playdate instead of disappearing for hours. My knees hit the floor before I could stop myself. I wrapped my arms around them so fiercely they both made little noises, half complaints, half giggles, and I felt their tiny hands pushing weakly at me as if to gently remind me that they still needed to breathe. But even then, even when they squirmed and shifted and mumbled “Mommy, Mommy, you’re squeezing us,” I couldn’t let go for a long time. I buried my face in their hair, kissing their heads again and again, breathing them in like I was afraid they might vanish into thin air if I blinked too hard. My whole body was shaking, not in sobs exactly, but with the kind of tremor that comes after a fall you barely survived. And maybe that’s what this was—falling and

156Alex.I didn’t even realize how tightly I was gripping the note until Marcus reached across the table and gently pulled it from my hand, the corner tearing slightly against my fingers. I’d been staring at it for almost an hour before I finally called him, the simple sentence etched into my mind so sharply that I could still see it even with my eyes closed. Round one is over. Whoever wrote it had confidence, arrogance, and a familiarity with danger that most people never developed. It wasn’t a bluff. It wasn’t a warning. It was a declaration.Marcus smoothed the torn edge, flattening the paper on his laptop case as if handling evidence from a crime scene—which, I suppose, it was. “I’ll get it matched against the database,” he said, slipping it into a protective sleeve. “If there’s anything—even a hint of a previous threat or known sample—we’ll find it.”I nodded, though my mind was miles away. I could still see Stella’s face last night when she found that note inside the stuffed an

158Alex.Sleep refused me that night. I lay on my side in the guest room closest to the twins, the faint hum of the air conditioning and the distant, steady footsteps of the guards doing nothing to calm my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, the memory of her lips against mine played over and over, vivid and raw, too real to be ignored. I told myself it was a mistake. It had to be. We couldn’t—no, we shouldn’t—mix desire with this chaos, this constant threat hovering over us. I knew all of that logically. I’d been through enough dangerous situations, enough threats, enough schemes to know the cost of letting emotion cloud judgment.But logic had no hold over memory. Every time I blinked, I saw her face, hair loose around her shoulders, her lips parted in the same way they’d been pressed to mine, her eyes searching mine with that mixture of anger, longing, and vulnerability that had always undone me. I could still taste the faint sweetness of her breath, the sharp tang of the frustrati