His Dangerous Love On Ice (Olivia and Zane) novel Chapter 111

Zane’s POV

It took less than three hours to figure out what stage one was.

I’d been sitting at my desk, staring at three monitors, waiting for Max to send me the intercepted calls. My leg was bouncing under the table. I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t think straight.

And then my phone rang.

Leonardo. One of my men I’d planted on the board of directors at Hopkins Enterprise. Grayson Sinclair’s company.

My stomach dropped before I even answered.

“Talk,” I said, my voice clipped.

“We’ve got a problem.” Leonardo’s voice was tight. “An anonymous buyer just made an offer for a controlling stake in the company. The board’s in chaos. Half of them want to sell, and the other half don’t know what to do.”

I closed my eyes. My jaw clenched so hard I thought my teeth might crack. “Who’s the buyer?”

“That’s the thing. It was anonymous at first, but I did some digging.” He paused. “It’s your father.”

Of course it was.

Of fucking course.

My hand tightened around the phone. I could feel the anger building in my chest, hot and sharp, but I forced it down. I needed to think. Needed to confirm.

“Send me everything you have.”

“Already done.”

I hung up and pulled up the files Leonardo sent. Offshore accounts. Shell companies. Layers and layers of bullshit designed to hide the buyer’s identity. But I’d seen this before. I knew my father’s methods.

This was him.

And suddenly, everything clicked into place.

The text messages I’d been getting about Olive. The cryptic warnings. The last one I’d received during the game: “Can she trust you enough to save her?”

They weren’t just taunting me. They were setting me up. Using my relationship with Olive as bait. And my father was right in the middle of it.

Stage one wasn’t about me at all. It was about Grayson. About destroying the man my father had already ruined ten years ago. The man he’d made me take the fall for.

And now he was finishing the job.

But I wasn’t a fool. This wasn’t just about Grayson’s company. This was bait. A trap designed to make me react. To make me expose myself.

They wanted me to fall right into it.

Or maybe they wanted to use me as the trap itself.

Either way, they knew exactly how important my relationship with Olive was. They’d been watching. Studying. Planning.

I picked up my phone and called my father.

He answered on the first ring, which slightly shocked me. My father never picked up that fast. Never sounded… cheerful.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify