All Chapters of The Disgraced Husband Is the Septamillionaire Heir: Chapter 221
- Chapter 230
307 chapters
CHAPTER 164
The private room was soundproofed, insulated, sealed away from the rest of the world with the kind of careful architecture that allows a man to exist in complete isolation while still remaining at the center of an empire. Dark wood paneling covered the walls. A single lamp cast warm light across a mahogany desk that had belonged to Jerry Stone's father before him, and before that to his grandfather.The only sound was Debussy. Clair de Lune. The piece played from speakers embedded in the walls, the notes rising and falling with the kind of melancholic precision that most people found soothing.Jerry Stone was not most people.He sat in a leather chair that cost more than most cars, his fingers steepled before his face, his single eye closed while the other remained permanently shuttered behind a scarred lid that had been sealed in a fire thirty years ago. The music seemed to energize him rather than calm him. His foot tapped against the carpeted floor in a rhythm that had nothing to d
CHAPTER 165
The warehouse was cold. The kind of cold that comes from concrete floors and metal walls with no insulation, no mercy. Vivian sat on a metal chair that had been bolted to the ground, her wrists zip-tied to the armrests, her ankles tied to the chair legs. A black fabric hood covered her head, pulled down over her face, allowing her to breathe but nothing more.She had stopped screaming approximately six minutes ago. Before that, she had screamed continuously for twenty minutes, demanding, threatening, promising retribution. Now her throat was raw and her voice had faded to something hoarse and desperate."Let me go!" she shouted, her voice cracking on the second word. "Right now! I swear my family will find me! My grandfather will tear this place apart! Carden will—"The slap came from nowhere.It arrived with the force of genuine violence, the kind that doesn't come from anger so much as from simple disregard for the recipient's comfort. The blow caught Vivian across the right side of
CHAPTER 166
The pain was extraordinary.Not the sharp, clean kind that announces itself and fades. The kind that blooms. That starts at the point of impact and spreads outward in concentric rings, swallowing the cheek, the jaw, the temple, filling the entire right side of her face with heat so intense it felt like something was being pressed against her skin from the inside.Vivian's head had gone sideways from the force of it. Her neck strained against the sudden momentum, and for a moment the world simply stopped making sense. Her ears rang, a single high pitched tone that crowded out every other sound in the warehouse, turning the darkness beneath the hood into a sensory void where only the pain existed.She tasted metal.Not immediately. It arrived a few seconds after the slap itself, seeping from somewhere inside her mouth where the impact had driven her cheek against her own teeth. She pressed her tongue against the interior of her jaw and felt the small split there, and the blood that came
CHAPTER 167
"It means that your phone doesn't work here. It means the signal jamming is active on a three block radius. It means that even if your grandfather deployed every resource he has, which he has, I know that, he still wouldn't find you in time to matter." He paused to draw from the cigar. The exhale was slow, deliberate. "It means you are alone. Entirely, completely alone. And you will stay alone, and you will suffer alone, and whatever happens to you in this room happens to you alone."The words landed one at a time, each one settling into Vivian's chest with the weight of something specifically designed to find the crack in a person's composure. She felt them working on her, felt the fear they were meant to activate, cold and genuine and real, pressing up from somewhere beneath the surface of the strength she was performing.She was scared.Not of the man's voice, not of the darkness or the cold or even the zip ties. She was scared in the primal, fundamental way that surfaces when the
CHAPTER 168
Jerry Stone rose from his crouch and stepped back. The cigar moved to his lips once more and the ember brightened, casting a brief, dim glow across the lower half of his face before fading back into shadow. He was careful about that, Vivian noticed. Careful about where he stood, how he positioned himself relative to whatever light existed in the warehouse. As if his face was something he had decided she didn't deserve to see."You don't have the right to ask questions," he said. The words came out without heat, without the need for emphasis. He wasn't making a point. He was stating a fact the way someone states the temperature of a room. Observable. Uncontested. Simply the nature of things as they existed in this particular moment. "Not here. Not with me."Vivian said nothing."I have that right," he continued, and she heard him move, footsteps slow and deliberate, circling her chair without any urgency. "Not you. There's a hierarchy to situations like this. You'll find that it become
CHAPTER 169
The sound that came from his throat was short and dismissive, a snort that carried more contempt than most sentences. His footsteps moved, quick and purposeful this time, and then his hand was in her hair.He did not touch it gently. He gathered a fistful at the crown of her head and yanked upward with enough force to drag Vivian's face toward the ceiling, arching her neck back, tipping her chin up until she was staring into the darkness above her with her throat exposed and her entire upper body pulled taut against the restraints.The pain was sharp and immediate, the burn of hair follicles strained against their roots, spreading across her scalp in a wave that she had to actively refuse to react to. Her fingers curled into the armrests. Her toes pressed flat inside her shoes.She did not cry out.Jerry leaned down until his face was somewhere close to hers, still positioned so that she couldn't see it even if the hood had been removed, his voice arriving from above and to the left,
CHAPTER 170
Vivian was not simply sitting there.From the moment the hood had been pulled over her head and the chair had stopped moving beneath her, she had been working.Not with her hands, not with her body, because those were accounted for and locked down. With her mind.She had been counting.The number of steps between the door and her chair when they'd brought her in. Roughly eighteen, adjusted for the shuffle in her movement from being pulled.The ceiling height, estimated from the way sound traveled when Jerry's voice rose slightly, the echo placing it somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet.The second door she'd identified on her left, located by the draft that carried the faint smell of rust and outdoor air every time someone moved near it.She had been listening to everything beneath his voice.The distant sound of machinery, either a generator or industrial equipment, somewhere below her feet or through a wall.The faint shuffle of at least two other people stationed near the main
CHAPTER 171
The realization moved through her like electricity. If Carden were dead, there would be nothing to negotiate.There would be no trade, no leverage, no reason to keep her breathing. A dead man's wife served no purpose as a hostage unless the goal was to punish someone who was still living.Carden had survived the explosion. He was out there right now.But the moment that relief arrived, the second thought came directly behind it, and this one was cold.If they had taken her to use against Carden, and they had moved on her this quickly, this decisively, then they had been watching.They had known where she was, what she was doing, and exactly when to intercept her. The intersection at Greyford and Ninth hadn't been random. It had been planned.Which meant the men she had sent to protect Carden, the entire operation she had set in motion to find him, might have been visible to these people the entire time.And if that was true, then Carden walking toward wherever she was right now was ex
CHAPTER 172
The footsteps had stopped moving.Vivian heard the voice settle into a position somewhere directly in front of her, still outside her line of sight even with the hood, but close enough that she could sense the shift in the room's atmosphere as the man who owned the voice finally allowed himself to be still.She had thought she was prepared. She had built composure like a wall and reinforced it and convinced herself that whatever came next would simply be another thing to endure. But there was a difference between preparing for something abstract and preparing for the moment when the abstract became real and present and wearing a single eye that had seen things.The hand that lifted her chin was different from Jerry's. Stronger. The grip was firm without being cruel, the kind of grip that belongs to someone who has no need to prove their strength because it has been proven so many times already that it has become background information about them.The hood was still over her face. She
CHAPTER 173
Jerry Stone walked through the corridors of his underground facility with the measured pace of a man whose mind was already three moves ahead of the present moment. The warehouse where Vivian was being held receded behind him, and with it went the immediate problem of containment. What replaced it was something far more interesting.Carden.The name circled through Jerry's thoughts like a predator circling prey, and for the first time in several years, Jerry felt the particular thrill that came from encountering something truly formidable. Not dangerous in the way that guns were dangerous. Not powerful in the way that money was powerful. But dangerous in the way that nature was dangerous. The way that forces outside of human control were dangerous.A man who could dodge bullets.A man who could dismantle an entire operation in less than an hour.A man who was motivated by something as simple and absolute as protecting a single person.Jerry's visible eye narrowed as he thought through