THE BILLIONAIRE FORBIDDEN PROMISE

CHAPTER 5 - IT WAS MARCUS

The board meeting lasts ninety minutes and feels like ten years.

I answer every question with numbers, not emotion. I explain the licensing partnership clause by clause until the manufactured violation Daniel planted collapses under its own weak construction. I watch two board members who arrived hostile leave merely skeptical, which is the best outcome I can manufacture with my brother missing and my company's stock still bleeding in real time.

The elevator ride down feels longer than the meeting itself. I replay every question the board threw at me, searching for the one I answered wrong, the one c***k that will let Daniel back in tomorrow with a sharper knife. I find none. That should feel like a victory. It doesn't, not with Marcus's silence sitting in my chest like a stone I can't put down.

Ethan is waiting outside when I finally step out, which surprises me until I remember Natalie called him an hour ago without telling me, correctly guessing I'd need someone in my corner who isn't paid to be there.

"You look like you survived a war," he says.

"I survived a boardroom. Some days those are the same thing." I don't have the energy to perform composure for him the way I do for everyone else, and something in his face tells me he's noticed that difference and decided not to comment on it. "Marcus is missing."

His expression shifts instantly, all levity gone. "Since when?"

"Yesterday afternoon. His car's in the garage. His apartment's empty. And Daniel just orchestrated a stock hit timed exactly to when I'd be too distracted to notice my own brother had vanished."

"You think they're connected."

"I think everything in my life has been connected to Daniel Blackwood since before I was old enough to understand what that meant, and I am done being three steps behind him." I press my fingers to my temples, willing the headache back below the surface. "I found a file last night. Twenty-eight years old. Your father's name is on it."

I watch something close behind his eyes, careful and immediate, and it tells me everything before he says a word.

"You already knew," I say quietly. "You knew before you ever walked into my office."

He doesn't deny it, which somehow hurts more than a denial would have. "My father was accused of stealing proprietary technology from Sterling International when I was a kid. He never told me who accused him specifically, just that it was someone at the top, someone whose name he refused to say out loud for years because he thought speaking it would make it more real. I didn't know for certain it was your father until I saw the company logo on old paperwork he kept in a drawer he thought I never found."

For a moment neither of us speaks. The hallway feels smaller than it did a minute ago, the marble colder, the distance between his honesty and my anger narrowing into something I don't have a name for yet.

"So this whole partnership"

"Started as a way to get close enough to find the truth. Yes." He says it plainly, the way he says everything, refusing to soften it into something easier to hear. "But it stopped being about that weeks ago, Victoria. I didn't expect to actually" He stops himself, jaw tight, like the rest of that sentence is more dangerous than anything Daniel Blackwood has ever threatened me with.

"Didn't expect to what?"

"To care whether you survive this," he says. "Which is inconvenient, considering my father might be the reason your family started falling apart in the first place."

I should walk away. Every instinct built over eleven years of protecting an empire tells me to treat this exactly like the liability it is a partner with a hidden agenda, a relationship compromised from its very first handshake. Instead I stand in a marble hallway with my company hemorrhaging value two floors below and feel something c***k open in my chest that has stayed sealed since before Daniel ever put a ring on my finger.

"There's a note in the file," I say instead of walking away. "Find the second file before it finds you. I don't know who wrote it, or what it means, but I think whoever left it wants me to find something your father knew and mine buried. And I think Marcus knew it too."

"You think that's why he's missing."

"I think my brother has been keeping something from me for years, and I think it's finally caught up with him." My voice cracks on the last word, just barely, and I hate that it happens in front of him, and I hate more that some small unguarded part of me is glad it happened in front of him instead of anyone else. Eleven years of never letting anyone see me falter, and it takes one hallway conversation with a man I met three weeks ago to c***k the seal.

Ethan doesn't reach for me. He doesn't offer the easy comfort other men have tried and failed to give me over the years, the kind that always felt more like a performance for whoever might be watching than something meant for me. He just stands close enough that I can feel the warmth of him without either of us closing the distance, and says the only thing that actually helps.

"Then let's find the second file. Together. Whatever it costs either of us."

My phone buzzes before I can answer him, Natalie again, this time with a message that makes the marble floor tilt beneath me.

Found something in the archive access logs. Someone requested the Cole file eleven days ago. It wasn't Daniel Blackwood.

It was Marcus.

I stare at the screen until the letters blur, until Ethan's hand finally closes over mine, warm and steady, and for the first time since the photograph arrived on my phone three weeks ago, I understand that the person I trusted most may have been the one keeping the biggest secret of all.

Somewhere in this city, my brother is either hiding or hidden, and only one of those possibilities lets me forgive him. I don't know yet which one I'm walking into. But standing in that hallway with Ethan's hand over mine and my empire cracking open beneath both our feet, I know exactly where I'm starting.

The archive. Tonight. Whatever the second file is, I intend to find it before Daniel Blackwood does, before it costs me the one person left who might still be telling me the truth.