Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 211 - Chapitre 220

Adrian POVThe report landed on my desk at eleven forty-seven, buried between a quarterly earnings summary and a briefing on the Bangria corridor project, and it took me approximately four seconds to understand that the rest of my day had just been rewritten.Calloway had compiled it. It was two pages and had zero embellishment. My head of intelligence had spent fifteen years at K16 before deciding the private sector paid better and asked fewer questions, and he wrote the way he thought. It was clean, verified, stripped of anything that wasn't essential.07:38 local time. Multiple coordinated strikes on the Ross compound, Highfields district, Bangria. Estimated three to four firing positions. Sniper-grade weaponry. Attack duration: approximately fourteen minutes. Ross security team engaged. Compound sustained significant structural damage.07:52 local time. Two-vehicle convoy associated with Rowan Brice approached from the south. Convoy intercepted by unknown third-party force before

Adrian POVI sat down. Buttoned my jacket. Adjusted my tie. Moved the Calloway report from the centre of my desk to the top drawer, face down, beneath a stack of quarterly summaries. Then I reconsidered, pulled it back out, and placed it in the drawer beneath my chair where it couldn't be seen from any angle in the room.I composed myself and waited.I put the phone face down on the desk.Finally, the elevator chimed and the doors slid open ushering Isabella into my office. She wore white. A fitted sheath dress, sleeveless, cut to just above the knee. Her dark hair was pulled back in a chignon so precise it looked architectural, and her makeup was the kind of minimal that took forty-five minutes to achieve. She carried a small clutch in one hand. No phone. No bag. Nothing extraneous.She'd come light. Which meant she'd come ready.Her eyes swept the room the way they always did, quick, cataloguing, measuring the distance between furniture, the placement of objects, the things that we

Evelyn POVI don't remember calling Belle. I must have, because twenty-two minutes later she was at my door, still in the clothes she'd been wearing when we'd spoken earlier, her car keys in one hand and a look on her face I'd never seen before. Not the playful Belle or the professional Belle or the protective Belle who'd once threatened to kill Adrian with her car. This was a Belle stripped bare. A woman who loved her friend and could see that her friend was falling apart.She didn't ask what happened. She took one look at me, sitting on the hallway floor in my stained sweatshirt with swollen eyes and a puppy in my lap, and she sat down beside me."Tell me," she said.I told her. The words came out in fragments, looping back on themselves. A phone call from an unknown number had called to tell me that Gabriel’s home in Bangria was attacked, that there were several shooters, and that up until the moment I received the call, there was no confirmation of whether Gabriel was alive or de

Adrian POV"We need to talk about Evelyn."Isabella said the name the way a jeweller sets a diamond on velvet, then proceeds to say the price.She was still standing near the window, silhouetted against the Crescent Harbour skyline, and the afternoon light turned her white dress translucent at the edges. She looked beautiful. She'd always looked beautiful. That had never been the issue. The issue was what lived behind the beauty, and right now, for the first time in eight years, she wasn't bothering to hide it."Sit down, Isabella," I said.She nodded, flashed me a smile before crossing the room to sit and crossing her legs. She set her clutch on the arm of the chair. Her hands were still, her posture relaxed, and her eyes were fixed on mine with a focused calm that worried me."How long have we known each other, Adrian?" she asked."You know the answer to that.""Since we were sixteen. Twelve years. I've known you longer than most people you employ. I've known you through three corpo

Adrian POVThe elevator would be too slow, so I took the stairs, all twenty-three flights, my shoes hammering against concrete, the sound echoing through the stairwell.By the time I hit the ground floor, my heart was slamming, and my shirt was damp under the jacket. I didn't care because somewhere across this city, Evelyn was watching a television screen that was telling her Gabriel Ross was dead, and I had the one piece of paper that could tell her otherwise.I crossed the lobby at a pace that made my security team jog to keep up. I went through the glass doors into the underground parking garage that I use alone. I dismissed my security team and told them I wouldn't need them for the rest of the day. Even my driver was surprised when I asked him for my car keys and asked him to take the day off. I started the car, the tyres screaming against the concrete as I pulled out of the space and aimed it toward Wrenfield.It was a fourteen-minute ride in moderate traffic from Whitmore Towe