Page 87 of The Billionaire’s Contract Bride

Aria gasped, her breath catching in her throat. “How did you know?”

“You stopped drinking coffee three weeks ago,” Damien murmured, his thumb gently catching a stray tear on her cheek. “You hide morning nausea with peppermint tea. And you have carried three pharmacy receipts in your handbag for ten days.”

Of course he knew. He was Damien Blackthorne. He noticed everything about her. And that was currently breaking her heart.

He unclasped his heavy signet ring—the key to every vault, terminal, and voting share in the Blackthorne portfolio—and pressed the warm metal into her palm, closing her fingers over it.

“My voting shares automatically transfer to my wife upon my incapacity or arrest,” Damien declared, turning to face the legal council and his grandfather.

“I don’t want your company!” Aria cried, her voice cracking. What she didn’t say was that she wanted him. The him he was trying to be, for her and their child.

“Neither did I, once.”

The lead agent stepped up, pulling Damien’s hands behind his back and snapping cold steel handcuffs over his wrists.

Before they turned him toward the door, Damien leaned in close, his lips brushing the shell of her ear.

“Do not try to save me,” he whispered.

Then he turned his head and locked eyes with Augustus, whose pale face had drained of all color.

“Destroy them,” Damien commanded her.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Mrs. Blackthorne

Aria became acting chair of Blackthorne Global at nine the next morning.

The board expected grief, confusion, and obedience. They assumed a young woman thrashing in the wake of her husband’s federal arrest would surrender to executive guidance.

Mrs. Blackthorne had once sounded like a heavy title placed over Aria’s own identity. Now she understood she could wear it without disappearing beneath its weight.

She walked into the thirty-fourth-floor boardroom flanked by Lucien, three top forensic accountants, a federal compliance monitor, and Marisol—the former lead nurse now serving as her key adviser to the hospital preservation committee.

“All executive transfers across every division are frozen indefinitely,” Aria announced, taking her seat at the head of the table. “Every subsidiary connected to Victor or Augustus enters an immediate independent forensic audit. Furthermore, the twelve community hospitals will be stripped from corporate management and moved into a protected nonprofit foundation.”

Victor’s face flared red on the primary video monitor. “You cannot walk in here and dismantle a century of family governance!”

Aria looked straight into the camera lens. “Watch me.”

When a senior director habitually directed his financial follow-up question toward Victor, Aria interjected smoothly: “You can ask me.” The board adjusted quickly.

After the meeting, Aria retreated to Damien’s master office. Inside his locked desk drawer rested a single, sealed black envelope with his hand-drawn crest on the wax.

Inside was a document titled simply: People to destroy if I am unavailable.

The list was exhaustive: corrupt directors, offshore shell entities, bought regulatory officials, and three federal judges. But at the bottom of the page, in Damien’s bold, precise handwriting, he had added a final line:

If Aria is reading this, she will know destruction is optional. Follow her instead.

She did not execute his revenge hit list blindly. Instead, she converted every name, account number, and transaction log into federal state’s evidence.

Celeste testified under full immunity. Lucien successfully isolated the exact system backdoor used to generate Aria’s forged signatures, tracing the IP trail straight back to Augustus’s vault and Victor’s private servers.

At the end of her first week, Aria visited Damien at the federal detention center.

He sat behind reinforced glass in a coarse dark uniform, stripped of every custom suit, signet ring, and symbol of absolute authority.

“You look tired,” Damien said, his deep voice muffled slightly through the static of the receiver.