Chapter 474
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Chapter 474:
“I’m so sorry,” Jocelyn choked out, her hands flying up to grip the lapels of his jacket. “Gaston, I’m so sorry. I was so scared p>
Gaston let out a rough, ragged sound. The anger dissolved completely, replaced by a desperate, consuming hunger.
He brought his mouth down onto hers.
The kiss was explosive — a violent collision of relief, apology, and raw, unfiltered need. Jocelyn melted against him, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him back with a frantic, aching urgency.
𝘑𝘰𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘯
The temperature in the cabin climbed sharply. Gaston’s hands slid down her back, gripping her waist and pulling her hard against him. He broke away just far enough to speak against her lips.
“You are never sleeping in that guest room again,” he rasped.
The Maybach cut through the freezing night, but inside the soundproof cabin, the cold war was finished — burned away entirely and replaced by the fierce, sustaining heat of a marriage finally built on absolute truth.
Midnight. The Meatpacking District.
The air inside the underground, VIP-only cigar bar was thick with blue smoke and the smell of expensive bourbon. The lighting was deliberately low, designed to conceal the faces of the city’s elite.
Kieran Douglas sat in a high-backed leather booth in the darkest corner of the room. He wore a black turtleneck, his face gaunt, his eyes burning with a feverish, toxic obsession. Sitting across from him was Isabelle Sterling. A faint bruise was still visible on her cheekbone — a souvenir from her brother’s violent reaction to Gaston’s financial assault.
“I warned you,” Kieran said, his voice a low, mocking drawl. He took a slow drag from his cigar. “I told you not to play petty games with Gaston Collins. He doesn’t deal in rumors. He deals in nuclear codes p>
Isabelle glared at him, her eyes sharp with venom. “Are you enjoying this? Defending the man who stole your fiancée p>
“She isn’t his,” Kieran hissed, the facade of calm cracking instantly. His fingers tightened around the crystal whiskey glass. “She is confused. He manipulated her p>
He leaned forward across the table. The manic light in his eyes was unsettling. “You don’t destroy a man like Gaston Collins by gossiping about his ex-therapist. You destroy him by finding the bodies he buried p>
Kieran reached into his pocket, withdrew a heavy encrypted black USB drive, and slid it across the polished wood toward Isabelle.
“I have hired the most expensive, ruthless hacker syndicate on the dark web,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “They are currently running a brute-force attack on Gaston’s offshore servers — digging into his mother’s accident, his medical records, his shell companies. The second I find a single drop of blood on his hands, I am going to ruin him p>
Isabelle looked at the USB drive. A slow, malicious smile spread across her face. They were no longer simply jealous ex-partners. They had become something far more dangerous.
Across the city, high above the clouds in the Collins penthouse, the master bedroom was bathed in the soft, warm glow of the bedside lamps.