Chapter 125 - Suspicious Billionaire

The morning sun bled through the cab's grimy windows in thin, fractured beams, painting soft streaks of gold across Eliana Bennett's face. She sat stiffly in the back seat, her slender fingers worrying the frayed hem of her sky-blue blouse. At twenty-four, Eliana carried the kind of quiet scars that didn't always show. Her mother had disappeared from her life when she was barely old enough to speak; her father—a gentle soul with failing health—had done his best to raise her in a house where love was abundant but money was not. Even when a fleeting brush with inherited wealth knocked at their door through her adopted grandfather, poverty still clung to them like an unshakable shadow.