LOVE BEYOND THORNS: THE BILLIONAIRE INVESTOR

The meeting ended soon and everyone returned to their classes

The message followed Isabella through every class that day. No matter how hard she tried to focus on the lesson in front of her, the same questions kept circling back.

Who had sent it?

How does anyone still know the name Daniel Hart? He’s been dead for four years

And the question she was almost afraid to ask herself could they know what had actually happened to him?

By the time the final bell rang, she’d barely absorbed a single word from her last two classes. She sat frozen in her seat for a moment after the room emptied, the folded note still pressed between her fingers.

Emma noticed immediately. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“That is definitely not a nothing face.”

Isabella forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m fine.”

Emma clearly wasn’t convinced, but before she could press further, Isabella was already on her feet, bag over her shoulder.

“I have somewhere to be.”

“Where?”

“Just… somewhere.”

Emma sighed, the particular sigh of a friend used to being shut out. “You’re being mysterious again.”

If only she knew how true that was.

The stretch of ground behind Rosewood’s library was one of the few places on campus that stayed empty, even during the busiest hours. Tall trees lined the narrow path, and the afternoon light filtered through the branches in broken gold pieces across the dirt. Isabella checked her phone three minutes past three and found no one waiting.

Disappointment settled low in her stomach. Five minutes became ten. Ten became fifteen. The path remained as silent and still as when she’d arrived.

“Great,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I should have known better.”

She turned to leave and that was when she saw it. A small brown envelope, unmarked, resting on the bench a few feet away. Her pulse quickened as she approached it slowly, as though it might vanish if she moved too fast.

Inside were photocopied documents financial records, bank statements, business reports thick with numbers that meant nothing to her at first glance. Then one name jumped out from the page.

Hart Industries.

Her father’s company.

Her breath caught as she flipped through the pages faster, scanning highlighted transactions and handwritten notes crowding the margins. Someone had spent real time on this. Someone had been investigating something or someone with the kind of patience that didn’t come cheap.

The deeper she read, the colder the knot in her chest became. Millions of dollars, gone from company accounts, routed through shell companies she’d never heard of. And several signatures across different documents looked unnervingly identical, as if one hand had written them all.

Her father had spent his last years insisting he’d been betrayed by people he trusted. Was this the proof he’d never lived long enough to find?

Footsteps broke through her concentration heavy, deliberate, closing the distance behind her. She spun around and went still.

Adrian Kingsley stood several feet away, his expression as composed and unreadable as it had been on stage that morning. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The air between them felt charged in a way she couldn’t quite explain.

“What are you doing here?” The question came out sharper than she’d meant it to.

His gaze flicked to the papers in her hand, then back to her face. “I could ask you the same thing.”

His voice gave nothing away calm, controlled, the kind of voice built for boardrooms, not confrontations behind a library. Isabella tightened her grip on the documents instinctively, and his eyes caught the movement immediately. A small thing. Yet she felt, absurdly, exposed.

“What are those?”

Her heart stumbled. Should she tell him? No she barely knew this man.

“Nothing.”

One dark eyebrow lifted, unconvinced. “Nothing?”

“They’re private.”

A brief silence stretched between them, and for a fraction of a second, something close to amusement crossed his face before vanishing again behind that same unreadable calm. His eyes dropped briefly to her hand.

“Private documents don’t usually end up on public benches.”

The observation needled at her. “Why do you care?”

The question slipped out before she could stop it, and something flickered in his eyes there and gone again before she could be sure she’d seen it at all.

“Perhaps I’m curious.”

“About me?”

“No.” The answer came too fast, and the lie sat between them, obvious and somehow more frustrating than a real answer would have been.

A security guard hurried up the path before she could push further, visible relief crossing his face the moment he spotted Adrian. “There you are, sir. The board meeting starts in ten minutes.”

Adrian nodded once. The guard’s gaze landed on Isabella, and his expression shifted instantly. “You shouldn’t be here. This area is restricted during executive meetings.”

“I didn’t know that.”

The guard opened his mouth to argue, but Adrian cut him off with a single line. “It’s fine. She’s with me.”

The guard stepped back at once, the matter closed without further discussion.

Power. That was the first true thing Isabella understood about Adrian Kingsley, people obeyed him without hesitation, without question, as though resistance had simply never occurred to them. How much power does one person need, she wondered, before the whole world starts moving out of their way?

His attention returned to her, and for a moment the world seemed to shrink down to the two of them the documents in her hands, the questions neither of them had asked yet.

“You should be careful,” he said finally.

“What?”

His gaze dropped to the papers again. “Some secrets are dangerous.”

A chill settled over her, equal parts warning and something else she couldn’t name. Before she could respond, he turned and walked toward the administration building without another word, leaving her with more questions than she’d arrived with.

He didn’t tell her that an unknown number had reached him with a message of its own that morning three words sharper than anything in her envelope.

You want to know how Daniel Hart really died? Meet me behind the library after school.

He had walked toward that meeting expecting a stranger. Instead he’d found Isabella Hart standing in the same spot, holding documents she had no business possessing, looking as blindsided as he felt.

Two messages. Two strangers led to the same quiet corner of campus on the same afternoon. Whoever had arranged this knew exactly what they were doing and on his very first day as Rosewood’s new owner, that realization settled into him like a closing fist.

He had taken over this school for a reason of his own. He hadn’t expected someone to already be watching his next move before he’d made it.

Isabella watched his retreating figure until it disappeared around the corner of the building, confusion knotting tighter in her chest with every step he took. Who was he, really? Why did he speak as though he already knew things about her things she didn’t know about herself? And why, more than anything, had he looked at those documents like he recognized exactly what they meant?