The Billionaire's Silent Wife (Ryan and Eve) novel Chapter 76

Chapter 76 No More Strings

The phone slipped from Ryan’s hand and skidded across the thin rug; its screen glowed with the lawyer’s name and a link he hadn’t wanted to see. For a second the room existed in a blur, Eve’s hand, warm on his wrist; the hum of the air-conditioning; the faint clatter from the little kitchenette below. Then the news landed like a fist.

“Oh my God,” Ryan muttered, voice low as concrete. He thumbed the link and the page bloomed: a feed, an exposé, a dossier pulled together by a freelance financial journalist

who’d smelled blood in the water.

Screenshots of private emails, redacted bank transfers, anonymized testimonies, pieces that, if stitched together, painted a single, ugly picture: Jonathan Ashbrook, chairman, had been feeding tips, arranging trades before board announcements, buying and selling through proxies. Insider trading.

Carefully hidden for years. The article went further, names dropped like grenades, allies in government, a shadowy broker in Geneva. The byline smelled of someone who wanted to sell the story again and again until it burned the whole room down.

“You’re kidding,” Ryan said, and he wasn’t. His jaw went hard. He could see his father’s white-knuckled hand when he mustered him earlier; he could see his mother’s carefully arranged face; he could hear the public relations machine that would need oil and blood to stop a leak this wide.

“Steven’s behind this,” Ryan said. “He’s gone to the press.”

He hit redial. The line connected before the second ring. On the other end, Steven’s voice came through, cool and amused.

“Well, well. Heard of markets, Ryan? Heard of timing?” Steven said, a laugh undercutting the words like a knife. “You all thought you could ignore me and I’d stay quiet? I’m not a man to be mocked. You refuse to come to my banquet, you refuse to listen, fine. Let the world know a few uncomfortable things.

If you keep defying me, I’ll release more. Do you understand what else I have? You don’t want me to show what Jonathan did with the Gulf contracts, or how a few of your friends were complicit. Think about that. Think how deep your father’s footprints run.”

Ryan’s hand tightened around the handset until his knuckles paled. The right words rattled and failed. He had imagined threats, blackmail, nuisance, a smear campaign, but this was scalpel-deep.

“No, I’m not a grandfather to strangers’ bastards,” came Steven’s voice, cold as a closed vault. “You should have thought about that before you embarrassed us. You want to throw away a name for pity? Fine. I have no use for the title now.”

“Stop!” Eve’s whisper was almost a sob. “If you ruin him, you ruin me. You ruin this child, Nana would not have wanted this. How can you be so cruel?”

Ryan’s hands curled into fists. The old muscle memory of restraining his temper when his father goaded him; the long catalog of small humiliations his parents had inflicted when he’d been younger, all of it bristled to life. He wanted to stand, to drive to whatever hole Steven hid in, and drag him out by the collar.

Instead he kept his voice measured. “You will not touch them,” he said to the phone. “You will not touch her. If you do, every piece of dirt I have on you, every ledger, goes to places you will not be able to control.”

On the other end, a short, brittle laugh. “You think you have dirt?” Steven asked. “Child, you have no idea. I played the game because I had to. You had the luxury of being young and clueless. Now you want to threaten me? You accuse me of blackmail, yet you think it beneath you to come to the table? Be careful, Ryan. You can bury a man who crosses you, but sometimes you bury yourself as well.”