2026-05-13 16:14:27Edward looked at her for a long moment, his eyes darkening with something she could not quite name.
She really said that. A convicted criminal.
As if she had forgotten who had knelt on the floor three years ago, her and her parents, hands pressed together, voices breaking, begging him to please take the blame for her brother.
Her brother who had drunkenly run a car into someone and panicked like a coward.
They had begged Edward because they said the family could not survive the scandal. And he had loved her. So he said yes.
He served every single day of that sentence without complaint. And now she stood in front of him in a designer coat and called him a criminal.
He let out a short, dry laugh. "Am I a criminal, Eliza? If I had not taken the blame for your brother that day, would you even have a company to put on the market right now?"
The words landed hard. Eliza's jaw tightened, and for just a second something cracked behind her eyes, a flash of something raw. Then it sealed over again. She smoothed the front of her coat, lifted her chin, and kept her gaze just slightly above his.
"I will compensate you fairly," she replied evenly, her tone the same one she probably used in boardroom negotiations. "Ten million dollars and the villa. That is more than enough for you to live comfortably for the rest of your life."
Edward stared at her.
Then he laughed again, this time more openly, because the sheer absurdity of it hit him all at once like a cold wave.
The villa. She was offering him the villa as though it were a generous gift. The villa his parents had left him before they died. The one that had been in his name before he ever met Eliza Norton.
"That villa was left to me by my parents," he answered, his voice calm but carrying an edge sharp enough to cut. "It has nothing to do with you. It was already mine long before you came into the picture."
The silence that followed was sharp enough to sting.
Eliza pressed her lips together and looked away, her expression tightening almost imperceptibly.
Cathy, however, was far from finished. She crossed her arms and looked at Edward the way someone looks at something unpleasant they found stuck to the bottom of their shoe. Her lip curled slightly, her eyes dripping with open contempt.
"Do you even hear yourself right now?" Cathy snapped, her voice laced with venom so casual it was almost impressive. "You think you have any ground to stand on? Eliza has real men lining up for her. Successful men. Men with actual futures and actual worth. And you? You walked out of prison with a paper bag and a bad attitude." She tilted her head, eyes sweeping over him slowly and deliberately. "You are garbage, Edward. You are an absolute leech who clung to her name for years and now wants to stand here and act like the victim. It is embarrassing, honestly. You should be ashamed just to breathe the same air."
Her eyes glittered with satisfaction as she continued.
"You know who she is with now? Peter Henderson. Heir to the Henderson family. He has done more for her company in two months than you managed in your entire useless marriage. So please, for everyone's sake, stop humiliating yourself."
Edward turned his gaze slowly to Eliza. She did not flinch, did not deny a single word.
She simply looked at the agreement in Cathy's hands and pushed it forward, her face blank and resolute, already somewhere else in her mind entirely.
"Sign it," Eliza instructed quietly, her eyes finally settling on his with that cold, indifferent steadiness. "This is better for both of us."
Edward looked at her for one long, unhurried moment. He looked at the woman he had once loved enough to trade his entire freedom for.
Her eyes were focused and distant, already calculating the next move, already thinking about press releases and stock prices.
He reached out and took the ten-million-dollar check from the folder.
He tore it cleanly in half.
Then he picked up the pen, pressed it against the bottom of the divorce agreement, and signed his name.
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chapter 116: part-2
"You protected my assets.""Some of them. Not all. I did not have access to everything, and the ones I could reach, I had to move carefully, one at a time, over the course of months, without triggering any of the monitoring systems they had placed on your network.""Why." Edward leaned forward. "Why would you do that if you were working with the people who put me in prison.""Because I was not working with them when they put you in prison." John's voice cracked on the last three words, not dramatically, just a single fracture running through the surface of something that had been holding together for too long. "That came later.""Explain."John pressed both hands flat on the table. "After you disappeared, a man approached me. He knew everything. My connection to you, my connection to the Old Master, my financial history, my family. Everything." He paused. "He made me an offer. Cooperate and receive controlling interest in four major businesses that would set my family up for three gen
Chapter 116: The Photograph part-1
The tracking markers worked exactly as Edward had designed them.Within six hours, David Chen had mapped the movement of every document the armed men had carried out of the vault. Three went to a warehouse on the industrial side of the city. Two went to an address registered under a name that did not exist. The remaining three went to a single location that made Edward sit very still in his chair for a long time.John Santon's private financial office.Not his home. Not a hidden property. His actual office, the one with his name on the door, the one listed in public directories, the one where clients walked in during business hours and shook his hand and trusted him with their money.John had not tried to hide.Edward stared at the address on David's screen and turned that fact over in his mind. A guilty man hides. A desperate man runs. A man who lets stolen documents arrive at his own registered office is doing something else entirely.He was inviting Edward to come find them.Edward
chapter 115: part-2
Edward looked at the man who had fired, then at Richard's body on the floor, then back at the shooter. Something clicked into place behind his eyes."He was going to talk," Edward said calmly. "That is why you killed him. Not because he failed. Because he was about to become a problem."The shooter said nothing.Edward turned to the masked leader. "Richard was never important. He was a tool. A set of hands you needed to open a door, and the moment the door was open, the hands became disposable."The leader tilted his head slightly. "You are smarter than they told me you would be.""Who told you."No answer.Vivien moved forward. Her voice came out sharp and controlled, every word placed with the precision of someone who does not waste syllables. "Who sent you here. I want a name."The leader looked at her. "You are standing in a room full of documents you believe are valuable, Miss Holden. But the truth is that the original agreement, the real one, was removed from this vault years ag
Chapter 115: Abort part-1
The first thing that happened after the vault doors locked was silence. The kind that fills a sealed room the way pressure fills a diving bell, heavy and total and pressing against the eardrums.Then panic.One of the masked men grabbed the vault door and pulled. The steel did not move. He pulled again, harder, the muscles in his neck straining, his boots scraping against the polished floor."It is sealed," he said, turning to the others. His voice cracked on the second word. "The whole system is sealed.""Blow it open," another one said, reaching for his belt."With what. We are inside. Any charge strong enough to breach that door will kill everyone in this room, including us."The eight men looked at each other. Their training held their bodies still but their eyes were moving fast, scanning the walls, the ceiling, the cameras they had not noticed until the lights came on. The realization settled across them one face at a time, like dominoes falling.They had walked into a box and t
chapter 114: Part -2
"That sounds like something a person says when they have something to hide, John."Silence on the other end. A long, heavy silence."I am trying to protect you," John said finally, his voice quieter."From what.""From the consequences of knowing everything."Edward let the silence sit for three full seconds. "I appreciate the warning. But the vault opens tomorrow night."John said nothing more. The call ended.The following night, the Holden estate was lit from every window. Security teams lined the perimeter. Cars arrived carrying the family elders, each one escorted inside with the careful ceremony of people who understood that tonight carried weight.Vivien stood at the entrance to the vault level, her hands folded, her face a mask of cold authority. The elders filed past her one by one, descending the staircase into the reinforced corridor that led to the vault doors.Edward was not among them.He was in a security room on the floor above, watching four screens that showed every
Chapter 114: The Trap part-1
Edward spent thirty six hours preparing the vault and told no one what he had done inside it.He left every original document in place. Every record, every agreement, every piece of evidence that the enemy had spent years trying to destroy. He did not remove a single page.That was the bait.The trap was the room itself. He rewired the vault's locking mechanism to operate on a secondary circuit that only he controlled. He installed three cameras in positions that covered every angle of the interior. And he programmed the main doors to seal automatically the moment a specific signal was sent from his phone.When he was finished, he stood in the center of the vault and looked at the walls and the shelves and the decades of secrets stored inside them.Then he walked out and locked the door behind him.Vivien returned to Holden headquarters on a Tuesday morning. She walked through the lobby in the same dark coat she had been wearing the night she disappeared, her face carrying the cold co
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