All Chapters of Bought by the Ruthless Billionaire : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The city never fully slept, and neither did Adrian — because the thoughts that were manageable in daylight became uncontainable at 3 a.m. They had found Ethan at his apartment. Not taken — that had been the fear, the specific cold fear that had sent Alina out of her room at midnight without shoes, but it was not what they arrived to find. Ethan had fallen asleep with his phone on silent, the way he always did when he had an early shift the next morning, and he had opened the door bleary and confused to find Adrian Voss standing on his doorstep at twelve-fifteen with an expression Ethan would describe to Alina the next day as the most frightening thing he had ever seen on a human face. Not because it was angry. Because it was controlled in a way that was very close to the edge of not being. Alina had stood behind Adrian in the corridor and felt the particular physical release of terror when it turned out to be nothing — the boneless, ridiculous relief of it — and she had laughed, whi

Trust, Alina had learned, was not simply given or withheld — it was constructed, piece by piece, and the person who built it for you had decided exactly how fragile to make it. She had been in the study with Adrian for two hours. Not for any arranged reason — she had come in with a question about the legal timeline and he had shown her something on his laptop and the question had expanded into a conversation and the conversation had expanded into the two of them going through James Wren's documentation together, side by side, in the way of people who had stopped needing to explain why they were in the same room. She was learning the full shape of Marcus Hale. Not the surface Marcus — warm, efficient, trusted — but the architecture underneath. The nine years of careful accumulation. The access he had cultivated to Adrian's communication channels, his decision-making processes, his information streams. The way he had managed what Adrian saw and what he didn't. "This section," she sa

Alina had spent six months learning how to stay — and now she had exactly forty minutes to learn how to leave. Not from fear. Not because Marcus had frightened her into it — she had sat with that possibility on the drive back and examined it cleanly and decided it was not what was happening. She was leaving because James Wren had called an emergency meeting that evening and the first thing he had said when they all sat down was: we are ready. We move in seventy-two hours. And the second thing he had said was: Alina, for your safety and the integrity of the case, I need you out of the penthouse tonight. Legal reasons. Clean lines. The integrity of the witness position. She understood it. She still sat in her room for ten minutes after Adrian had explained it before she started packing. He stood in her doorway. "You don't have to rush," he said. "Take everything." "I don't need everything." She opened the wardrobe. She got her suitcase down. "I came with one bag. I can leave with

Adrian Voss had built his entire life on knowing what to say and when — and standing in Ethan's doorway facing Alina Carter, he had nothing. She had not expected him to come in person. Wren's two o'clock call had covered the operational details — timeline, documentation, what each of them needed to do in the next forty-eight hours — and she had been sitting with Ethan afterward, processing it, when the knock came at the door. Ethan opened it. They looked at each other — Adrian Voss and Ethan Cole, the two people most invested in Alina's outcome standing on opposite sides of a doorframe for the first time since a midnight check and a mutual unspoken understanding that they were now, whether they liked it or not, on the same side. Ethan stepped back. "I'll make tea," he said. And disappeared with the particular tact of someone who understood exactly when a room needed to be emptied. Adrian came in. He looked at the flat — the sofa, the film poster, the plant. The gap between this an

Freedom, it turned out, had a weight to it that Alina hadn't expected — and it pressed down on her chest every time she walked past her phone. She arrived at the penthouse at ten forty-five. The elevator opened and Adrian was already there — not standing waiting, that would have been too much, but in the living room with his laptop and three phones and James Wren on the screen, which meant he had been in the middle of this for some time. He looked up when she came in. The look lasted two seconds. She read everything in it that he did not say: that she was there, that she had come back, that this was the fact his evening had been organised around whether he admitted it or not. Then the two seconds passed and he was back to Wren on the screen and the phones and the work of what needed to happen before eleven tomorrow morning. "Sit down," James Wren said, from the screen. "There's a lot to cover." She sat. She set her bag by the sofa. She was still in the jacket she had grabbed at E