Page 55 of The Billionaire’s Contract Bride

On the back, written in precise, block lettering:

HE WATCHED YOU FIRST. NOW WE WATCH HIM THROUGH YOU.

Chapter Eleven: A Beautiful Weapon

Damien burned the photograph in a crystal ashtray on his desk.

He watched the flames consume Aria’s image first, then his own, until nothing remained but grey dust across the glass.

“That was evidence,” Aria said, watching the smoke rise toward the ventilation ceiling.

“It was a message,” Damien replied cleanly.

“Messages have senders.”

“And senders become careless when they believe they have successfully frightened you.”

Aria walked to the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of his office. Fifty stories below, Manhattan moved in cold streams of light, completely oblivious that someone had photographed her inside a supposedly secure penthouse suite.

“Were they inside the building?” she asked.

“No. The angle originated from the eastern tower.”

“You own that building too.”

“Through a logistics subsidiary.”

“Then your security is not as perfect as you pretend.”

Damien’s gray eyes lifted to meet hers. “Nothing is perfect once someone discovers what you value.”

He said it without hesitation—not as a line in a contract, but as a plain statement of fact.

Lucien entered the office, a black tablet in hand. “The eastern tower was cleared by security. A maintenance access room on the forty-eighth floor was opened using executive credentials at two fourteen this morning.”

“Whose credentials?” Damien asked.

Lucien hesitated, his glance shifting briefly toward Aria. “Hers.”

The room fell dead silent.

“I don’t have executive credentials,” Aria said, turning from the window.

“You do as a voting trustee of the Marital Trust,” Damien explained quietly.

“No one gave them to me.”

“Someone generated them before the wedding.”

“You?”

“No.”

Lucien brought up the digital audit log on the screen. The entry read: ARIA E. VALE-BLACKTHORNE — MAINTENANCE SUITE 48-B.

“They’re building a paper trail,” Aria realized aloud. “Making it look like I compromised security from the inside.”

Damien looked at her with something approaching grim approval. “Yes.”