Page 59 of The Billionaire’s Contract Bride

ACTIVE OBSERVATION: 5 YEARS, 3 MONTHS

Aria stopped breathing.

Five years. Not fourteen months.

She opened the earliest digital dossier. The initial photographs were taken from a distance: Aria leaving her night shift, visiting her mother, carrying groceries up three flights of stairs. Attached intelligence reports discussed her father’s missing corporate ledger and the possibility that he had passed key evidence to his family before his death.

Then she found files pre-dating the surveillance itself: her birth certificate, her father’s coroner report, and a second-grade class photograph taken weeks after his funeral. In it, eight-year-old Aria stared into the camera without smiling while her classmates wore paper crowns.

Someone had circled the faint gold chain around her neck in red.

Aria reached up and touched the pendant resting against her collarbone—the chain her father had given her the week before he died. On the screen, a high-resolution scan read:

Pendant examined visually. Storage component unconfirmed. Do not remove from subject without express authorization.

Her fingers trembled as she unclasped the chain and held the pendant beneath the desk lamp. A micro-seam ran along the rear casing, nearly invisible beneath years of light scratches.

She clicked open another sub-folder containing intelligence on her mother. Hospital logs. Wire transfers. And a high-resolution photo of Evelyn meeting Augustus Blackthorne outside a cathedral four years ago.

Evelyn looked furious. Augustus held a sealed document envelope.

The entry immediately following the photograph was blank—wiped from the server.

Aria kept scrolling as the tone of the reports shifted. Professional surveillance notes had gradually morphed into personal directives written in Damien’s precise handwriting:

Subject gave coat to shelter volunteer. Replace anonymously.

Subject skipped dinner again. Credit her hospital cafeteria account.

Intervene directly with collection agency. Do not allow contact with Evelyn Vale.

Nausea rose in her chest. She opened an audio file at random, and her own voice filled the room—a grainy recording of her singing poorly while cooking in her old apartment. It had been captured through her own cell phone microphone.

“Turn it off.”

Damien stood in the open doorway, wearing dark trousers, his chest bare, his expression carved from stone.

Aria closed the audio player. “Five years.”

“Give me the ring, Aria.”

“You tapped my personal phone.”

“The audio link was discontinued.”

“After how long?”

“Six weeks,” he said evenly.

“And that makes it acceptable?”

“No.” His absolute refusal to offer a defense made her blood run cold.

“You paid my meal accounts. You intercepted debt collectors. You altered my life without my knowledge.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”