Page 81 of The Billionaire’s Contract Bride

“Which security detail?” Damien asked, his voice chillingly cold.

Lucien met his gaze without flinching. “My personal team.”

A cybersecurity technician brought up a recovered video file on the main monitor. “We pulled deleted camera footage from the sub-basement pharmacy storage. This was logged early this morning.”

The high-definition video showed a tall figure entering the storage bay at 2:43 AM, wearing a security clearance badge and carrying a silver case matching the supplement shipment.

The man in the video moved like Lucien. Same height. Same heavy stance. Same subtle favor given to his left shoulder, held slightly lower from an old gunshot wound.

Aria looked at Lucien.

Damien did not. He kept his eyes locked on the screen. “Explain.”

Lucien’s expression remained utterly calm. “I was never in the sub-basement pharmacy.”

“The biometric log says otherwise,” the technician noted. “Your personal security key opened the vault door.”

“And the footage clearly shows your face,” Damien said, turning slowly to the man who had stood at his side for more than a decade. “You also entered Evelyn’s room the night before the wedding.”

“To replace a compromised guard,” Lucien stated.

“Without informing me.”

“You were with Aria. It was an immediate security risk.”

“That has never stopped you from reaching me before,” Damien said, his jaw tightening as a dangerous silence settled over the room.

Lucien unholstered his firearm, set it flat on the glass table, and stepped back. “I did not poison Evelyn Vale.”

Aria stared at the monitor, her mind racing. She replayed the clip. The figure certainly looked like Lucien. Same limp, same dark suit.

Timestamp: 02:43:12 AM.

Aria’s breath caught. She remembered that exact time.

“He couldn’t have been in the hospital basement,” Aria declared, her voice ringing clearly across the quiet room.

Everyone turned toward her.

“He was at the penthouse,” she said directly to Damien. “He was at your desk.”

Damien’s eyes narrowed. “Aria, travel time from the hospital to the penthouse is at least twelve minutes. The timestamp could be slightly off—”

“It isn’t off,” Aria insisted. “At 2:43 AM, I was sitting in your study, drafting the new terms. Lucien walked through the double doors at 2:44 AM carrying the revised asset schedule. I looked directly at the clock behind him. He could not have been in a basement three miles away sixty seconds earlier.”

The technician quickly ran a forensic script across the video file. “She’s right. The visible timestamp on the video feed was burned into the pixels manually. The original camera metadata shows the source file was recorded at 3:09 AM.”

“Someone manipulated the log to frame me,” Lucien said softly.

“Manipulated using whose clearance?” Aria demanded, stepping up to the technician’s terminal.

The technician hesitated, checking the digital signature twice. “The override certificate came directly from Mr. Blackthorne’s master terminal.”

Silence swallowed the room.

Damien’s private terminal required three separate authentications: his voice print, his palm scan, and the encryption chip inside his signet ring.

The ring.