BOUND TO THE BILLIONAIRE ALPHA Subtitle: A Forbidden Love Across Timelines CHAPTER ONE — The Fall The scream began inside the glass. It was a high, brittle sound, the kind of noise that splits the polite hum of a corporate evening into jagged pieces. It ripped through the atrium of Blackthorne Tower like a stone tossed into still water—eccentric, unnatural, and it made everyone look up. Amelia Carter’s clipboard slid from her fingers and clattered against marble with an echo that sounded absurdly loud in the cavernous lobby. Time narrowed, reorienting itself around that one sound: a scream, a splintering crack, the sudden cascade of shattered glass. She moved because one part of her was practical and trained for damage control. She moved because she had spent too many late nights at an office like this to watch the drama unfold and do nothing. And she moved because beneath the civilized noise she felt something much older: the animal insistence to go toward trouble and fix it. On the 57th floor the world had gone wrong.