The Wife He Forgot to Marry (Winona and Yule) novel Chapter 555

Winona looked at it, confused. "What's this?"

"When Orion paid off the staff to drug me, my people had already swapped the vials. I took a mild sedative that I prepared myself. If things had gone south, my assistant would have had a doctor administer the reversal agent immediately."

He would never put his life in someone else's hands.

Winona stared at him, stunned. He had orchestrated the entire thing.

"The superficial injuries were from the guys Orion hired," Stefan continued, "but I deliberately pulled back my security detail so he'd think his plan worked. I needed him to realize that even with me out of the picture, he still wouldn't get what he wanted. Without me there to keep the others in check, they just turned on him and destroyed him."

Winona didn't know what to say. Her world was so straightforward. She couldn't fathom living a life where you had to gamble your own physical safety just to outmaneuver your own family.

Stefan watched her closely, a flicker of vulnerability in his eyes.

"This is my reality, Winona. This is what my world looks like. Does it scare you?"

He looked down at their intertwined hands, feeling her skin grow slightly cold against his. He wanted to hold on tighter, but gently began to pull his hand away.

Suddenly, Winona gripped his fingers tightly. Her gaze was soft, but fiercely determined. "Next time you have to do something like this, you tell me. Stefan, you always protect me and my family. I want to protect you, too. I want to protect the people you care about."

A rush of warmth flooded his chest. He smiled, his eyes softening. "I will."

*

For the next week, Winona buried herself entirely in the ADC project.

They had hit a massive wall. The data from several critical experimental batches was violently inconsistent, and they couldn't hit the required reproducibility metrics. The entire project ground to a halt.

Instead of blindly repeating the failed experiments, Winona stayed at her desk, meticulously auditing the process. She tore through lab notebooks and equipment logs, searching for the anomaly.

Noticing she hadn't stepped foot in the lab all day, Eloise couldn't resist a sneer. "What's the matter, Winona? Mr. Harper is sick and can't hold your hand anymore, so you just gave up?"

Ignoring the toxic commentary, Winona kept her eyes glued to the data logs.

Killian walked over, shooting Eloise a hard look. "I don't need to remind you how ridiculously high the technical threshold is for an ADC. The conjugation process alone is a nightmare. The fact that she managed to stabilize the DAR value and homogeneity at this level is already world-class."

Eloise seethed in silence, hating that Killian always jumped to Winona's defense. She refused to believe Winona could actually lead this project to success. She was just waiting for the moment Winona publicly crashed and burned.

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