The CEO's Rejected Wife And Secret Heir novel Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Chapter 10 – His Shock

Damien POV

I stood frozen in the hallway as she disappeared into the crowd.

Aria.

My wife.

The woman I’d thrown out four years ago.

"Mr. Blackwood?" My assistant’s voice cut through the chaos in my head, tentative and concerned. "The investors are waiting in Conference Room A."

I couldn’t move.

She’d looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was a stranger she’d just met at a business summit.

"Mr. Blackwood?" she repeated, louder this time.

"Cancel it," I said, my voice coming out rough and strangled. "Cancel everything for the rest of the day."

"But sir" she started, confusion in her tone.

"I said cancel it." I turned to her with wild eyes, and she stepped back at whatever she saw in my face. "Now."

She fled.

I made it back to my suite on the top floor before my carefully constructed control shattered completely.

The door slammed behind me with a sound that rattled the frame. I stood there, breathing hard, my hands shaking like I’d been electrocuted.

Aria Monroe. CEO of Monroe Global.

The same woman who’d looked at me with those eyes full of hope I’d deliberately crushed.

I yanked my phone from my pocket with trembling fingers. Dialed the number I’d called a thousand times over three years.

"Morrison," the private investigator answered on the second ring, his voice gravelly from cigarettes and late nights.

"She’s here." I paced to the window, my reflection harsh in the glass, it felt like stranger’s face staring back was staring back at me. "She’s in Ravenwood."

A pause stretched between us. "Who?"

"Aria. My wife." I ran a hand through my hair, destroying the perfect style with violent strokes. "She just gave a presentation at the business summit. Her company is Monroe Global."

"That’s impossible," Morrison said slowly. "We searched everywhere. Europe, Asia, South America. There was no trace"

"Well you missed something," I snapped, my voice turning vicious and sharp. "Because she was just on stage looking like she owns the world."

Another pause. "I’ll look into it."

"You do that." I ended the call and threw the phone onto the couch, watching it bounce against the leather cushions.

Four years. Four years of searching. Of guilt eating me alive.

Six months after she left, the truth had started coming out.

I’d been in my office late one night when Richard, one of Charles’s business partners, had gotten drunk at a company dinner. Started talking about how Charles had "handled" his disappointing daughter. How Vivian had been promised a bonus for "taking care of the problem."

Problem. They’d called her a problem.

I’d dug deeper after that. Found text messages between Charles and Vivian plotting. Found payments made to hospital staff to lie about paternity tests that were never taken. Found proof that the pregnancy had been actually real, that Aria had never tried to trap me.

The day she confronted me about the pregnancy I was drunk on anger about everything that happened, how her parents were trying to drain me dry. It seemed only Vivian understood me.

I’d told my pregnant wife to get rid of our child.

The memory made me sick even now.

I’d thrown her out based on anger and my own desperate need to feel nothing. To be the ice king my father had trained me to be.

I walked to my desk and pulled open the bottom. Inside was a single folder I kept locked away.

Photos from our wedding day.

I pulled out the first one with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. Aria in her wedding dress, standing alone in the mansion’s garden before the ceremony. She wasn’t smiling. She looked lost.

God. I’d slept with her sister on our wedding day.

The guilt was a living thing in my chest, clawing its way up my throat.

I’d been so convinced marriage was just business. That feelings were weakness. That I was incapable of love anyway, so why pretend?

I’d destroyed her for it.

I pulled out another photo, this one even more damning. The official wedding portrait. We stood side by side, not touching. I looked cold and distant. She looked like she was trying to disappear.

Then I opened the file on my computer. The one I’d created yesterday after hearing Monroe Global was attending the summit.

Recent photos of Aria Monroe, CEO.

She was transformed.

Power suits that hugged her curves, hair styled perfectly. Face sharp with authority and confidence. She stood in boardrooms like she owned them. No trace of the broken woman I’d thrown away.

"What did I do to you?" I whispered to her image on the screen, my voice cracking on the last word.

My phone buzzed against the couch cushions. A text from Marcus, of all people.

Saw your wife at the summit. Looking good. Bet you regret that divorce now.

I stared at the message, rage building in my chest.

Marcus. My bastard brother who’d crawled out of whatever hole Father had buried him in. Who’d been circling my company for months looking for weaknesses.

If he went near Aria. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Monroe Global just secured the Riverside Development deal. That was supposed to be ours.

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