Lahat ng Kabanata ng The S-Tier's Omega Bodyguard : Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

He almost turned back at the gate.Not out of cowardice or maybe a little out of cowardice, he was being honest with himself today, that was the whole point of today but because standing at the end of Elliot Sinclair's driveway on a Sunday morning with twenty-five weeks of twins pressing against the front of his jacket, he became very suddenly aware that there was absolutely no version of the next two hours that was going to be easy.He rang the bell anyway.The door opened almost immediately, like Elliot had been standing nearby. He probably had.They looked at each other. Elliot's eyes moved — just once, just briefly — to Kieran's midsection. The bump that no amount of layering was hiding anymore, that had finally, definitively, stopped being a secret the moment he walked through this door. Something crossed Elliot's face. Not shock. He'd known. They both knew he'd known. But knowing a thing and standing in front of it were different, and for one second the difference was visible on

Elliot was already in the waiting room when they arrived.Kieran saw him through the glass before Maya pushed the door open — sitting in one of the chairs along the far wall, in ordinary clothes, looking at his phone with the kind of concentrated attention that meant he wasn't actually reading anything. He looked up when the door opened. His eyes went straight to Kieran.Neither of them said anything for a second."Mr. Sinclair," Maya said, in the tone she used when she was being civil at some cost."Maya." He stood up. "Thank you for I mean. Thank you for being here."Maya looked at him for a moment with the specific expression she'd been slowly modifying for the last few weeks — not the shut-the-door-I'll-decide-later expression, but not warm either. Somewhere in the middle, carefully. "Don't make me regret it," she said, and went to sign them in.Elliot looked at Kieran. Kieran looked back. "You're early," Kieran said."I didn't want to be late."He'd been there twenty minutes ear

The filing came through at eight in the morning and Kieran read it twice before he fully believed it.Not because it surprised him. He'd known Marcus was building toward something the texts, the surveillance, the way every move for the last two months had felt like a man clearing the board before a final play. What surprised him was how clean it was. How ordinary it looked on paper. Just a board filing, just legal language, the kind of thing that arrived in inboxes every day in corporate environments and got skimmed and forwarded.Except buried in the middle of it, under the formal language about undisclosed personal liability and leadership confidence reviews, was his pregnancy. Named. Documented. Used as evidence that Elliot had compromised his professional position through personal conduct unbecoming of a CEO.They'd put his children in a legal document. As leverage.He set the laptop on the coffee table and sat back and looked at the ceiling and let himself feel that for a full si

He couldn't sleep.This wasn't new — sleeping had been difficult for weeks, the kind of pregnancy insomnia that came from having two small people who didn't know yet that three in the morning was not an appropriate time to be active. But tonight it was different. Tonight it wasn't the physical discomfort of running out of positions that worked, or the twins doing something gymnastic at an inconvenient hour.Tonight it was everything else.The board meeting tomorrow. The witness request. Jessica's story moving toward publication. The Marcus file out in the world now, doing what it was supposed to do, and the specific vulnerable feeling of having sent something into motion that couldn't be recalled.He got up at quarter to three because lying in the dark with all of it was worse than just getting up. He went to the kitchen. He got water. He sat at the table and looked at the window, which showed him the dark and his own reflection and not much else.He didn't hear Maya get up. She was j

The article went live at six in the morning on a Thursday.Kieran was already awake — had been awake since four, because that's what week twenty-eight looked like — and he read it on his phone in the kitchen with a cup of tea going cold beside him.It was good. That was his honest assessment. Jessica had done exactly what she'd said she'd do — the Marcus angle was the headline, documented and sourced and written in a way that made it very hard to argue with. The omega employee pattern was handled carefully, both Sophia and Rachel given space to speak in their own words. The pregnancy was one line, buried in the middle: An anonymous employee has filed for medical accommodation, which the company has confirmed.Clean. Accurate. Not cruel.He was on his second read, checking for anything that might cause problems, when he hit the paragraph near the end.He read it once. Read it again.Sources close to Sinclair Industries confirm that the anonymous employee has maintained a personal relat