The Don Tore Up Our Divorce (Gemma and Cassian) novel Chapter 461

Chapter 461
Jace’s POV 

Hearing her soft sigh of relief through the phone feels like absolution. I can be stubborn. I can dig my heels in until I break. But I don’t lie to her. Never to her. If I say I understand, I mean it. The fog in my head is still there, but it’s parting, letting in a harsh, clarifying light.

Her tone shifts, back to business, back to the Gemma I’ve always worked beside. It’s a lifeline. “Take care of things with Jessica over there. Once I’ve wrapped things up on my end, we’ll discuss the future location for the team.”

It’s an order. A plan. A future that includes me, but not in the way I’d dreamed. It’s enough. It has to be. I swallow the last of my self-pity and quietly agree. “Okay.”

The call ends. The silence in the room is different now. Less suffocating.

I look around. While I was on the phone, Jessica has been a whirlwind. The battlefield of empty bottles is gone. Every last one, finished or half-full, has been swept into thick black trash bags. The evidence of my stupidity, my collapse, has been efficiently erased. Just like that.

She’s standing by the door, holding the bulging bags, looking profoundly awkward. She gives me a quick, embarrassed smile that doesn’t reach her worried eyes.

“Uh, so you’re done with the call?” she whispers, as if afraid to shatter the new quiet. “I’ll leave you to rest then. I’ll just… take these out.”

She moves with careful, almost comical precision, tiptoeing over to retrieve her phone from my still-loose grip. Then she hefts the bags, turning to make her escape.

I watch her. This woman who saw me at my worst, who barged in and cleaned up my mess without a word of judgment. She’s trying so hard to be invisible, to not be a burden. A small, genuine smile touches my lips for the first time in days. It’s faint, but it’s real. Her behavior is so earnest, so flustered and kind, it cuts through the last of my haze. It’s amusing. And, against all odds, a little endearing.

Gemma's POV 

The day after Mikhail’s surgery, I arrive at the hospital expecting to find him resting, maybe groggy from pain meds. Instead, I find him sitting on the edge of his bed, dressed in the clothes he wore yesterday, trying to shove his feet into his boots. He looks pale, a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, but his determination is a tangible force in the room.

I stop in the doorway, my bag slipping from my shoulder. “Are you out of your mind?” The words are flat with disbelief.

He doesn’t even look up, just grunts as he tugs at a stubborn lace. “I’m discharging myself.”

“If you dare leave,” I say, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous register I know he’ll recognize, “I’ll freeze every single one of your cards. Don’t forget, Mr. Smith gave me all the passwords.” It’s a nuclear option, but it’s always worked. Money, or the threat of losing access to it, is a language he understands.

He finally glances up, fixing me with a stern, wounded look. “Gemma. You’re really not helping our friendship here.”

“My computer is at the villa,” I say, my mind already racing through protocols, damage assessments. “I’ll go get it. You stay here. And rest.” The last part is an order, echoing his from yesterday.

If I’d known last night, I could have contained it. A system compromised for hours is a nightmare. Every minute expands the damage exponentially.

I don’t wait for his argument. I turn and hurry out, leaving him fuming in his hospital gown. At the villa, I grab my laptop—a sleek, powerful machine that’s an extension of my own nervous system. I don’t bother going back. I set up right there at the kitchen island, the one Cassian nearly destroyed last night.

The connection to Bright Moon International’s servers is instant. I call Mikhail back, putting him on speaker as my fingers begin flying across the keyboard, lines of code and system logs scrolling past.

“Get someone from the company on the line with me,” I instruct, my voice all business. “Harold, if he’s there. I need direct access. It’ll be faster if I need to pull anything from their end or issue commands.”

Even though it’s the middle of the night back home, I know Harold’s team will be there, fighting a losing battle against a coordinated attack. I dive into the digital chaos, tracing intrusion paths, slamming digital doors. “I’ve erected firewalls around all the core confidential files,” I report, my eyes never leaving the screen. “But I can’t guarantee they didn’t exfiltrate something in the window before I locked it down. The logs are a mess.”

Over the phone, I hear Mikhail’s frustrated sigh, heavy with a pain that isn’t just physical. It’s the sound of a man realizing that without one specific, stubborn woman sitting miles away at a kitchen island, his entire, expensive tech department might as well be a ghost town. The helplessness in that sigh is more telling than any complaint.