
The Terms of His Heart
klakpraisestar · Ongoing · 98.1k Words
Introduction
Damien Voss. Forty-one years old. Self-made tech billionaire. The kind of man whose name appears in court settlements that get sealed before lunch and in boardrooms where people sign things they later pretend they never signed. On paper he is untouchable. In the circles Zara has spent years moving through quietly, he is something else entirely. A ghost with a net worth that could swallow small countries. A man who destroys careers the way other men change shirts. Quietly, efficiently, and without looking back.
Zara's father was one of those careers.
She was nineteen when it happened. When the company her father built over twenty years was swallowed whole by a larger machine, the paperwork signed in the middle of the night, the assets stripped, her father left with nothing but debt and a silence he never fully recovered from. Nobody could prove who pulled the strings. Nobody tried very hard. Zara has been trying ever since.
Now she is twenty-six, sharp enough to cut glass, and three years deep into an investigation that has cost her a stable job, two relationships, and more sleep than she can count. She has the shell companies. She has the paper trail. What she does not have is access. Not the kind that matters. Not the kind that gets her inside the building, inside the meetings, inside the man himself.
There is a job opening at Voss Industries. Corporate communications director. It is almost too perfect. And when Zara walks into that interview, Damien Voss looks at her across that desk with those grey unreadable eyes and slides a contract toward her, she is certain she has played this exactly right.
She has no idea he has been waiting for her.
Chapter 1
The elevator opened on the forty-second floor and Zara stepped out like she owned the place.
She did not. Not yet.
The lobby of Voss Industries was the kind of room built specifically to remind you of your own smallness. White marble floors so polished they threw your reflection back at you like still water. Ceilings high enough to have their own weather. The air was several degrees cooler than it needed to be, cold in the deliberate calculated way of a man who understood that discomfort was a tool and used it accordingly. A receptionist with a practiced smile and careful eyes looked up from behind a desk that cost more than Zara's car and her rent combined.
"Zara Cole. Ten o'clock appointment."
"Mr. Voss is expecting you." She said it the way people announced something unavoidable.
Zara adjusted the strap of her bag and followed the corridor toward the corner office at the far end. The walls held framed headlines and photographs, Damien Voss shaking hands with senators, standing at podiums, receiving awards with the expression of a man who found the whole exercise faintly beneath him. She had studied this face for three years. She knew the public version of it the way you knew the face of someone you had been watching from a distance for a long time, completely and without intimacy.
Three years of work had brought her here. Three years of traced shell companies and sourced documents and a paper trail so deliberately buried it had taken her fourteen months just to confirm it existed. Somewhere inside this building was the truth about what had happened to her father, a man who had spent twenty years building a logistics company from nothing, who had known people in this industry, who had once told her when she was twelve years old that the most important thing a person could do was build something that outlasted them.
His company had not outlasted him. It had been taken before he was fifty.
She was not going to waste this moment by being nervous.
The office door was open.
He stood at the window with his back to her, hands loose at his sides, looking at the city below with the stillness of a man who had long stopped being impressed by things that impressed other people. Damien Voss was taller than the photographs suggested. Broader. There was a density to him that no image had captured, something unhurried and certain, as if the world arranged itself around him and he simply waited for it to finish.
He did not turn when she entered.
"Sit down," he said.
Not a greeting. A directive issued to the glass without the small courtesy of eye contact.
Zara sat. She placed her bag on the chair beside her, folded her hands in her lap, and said nothing. Silence was a test men like this administered to everyone who sat across from them. They used it to measure how quickly discomfort would make you reach for unnecessary words. She had failed that test once, at twenty-two, in a different office, and she had not forgotten the lesson.
When he finally turned she was ready.
She had rehearsed for this face. The sharp jaw. The grey eyes every journalist described as cold. The composed expression that gave nothing away. What she had not prepared for was the way those eyes settled on her, not with the sweeping assessment of a man encountering someone new, but with something slower and more deliberate, the particular quality of a man looking at something he had already spent time thinking about.
He crossed the room, sat behind the desk, opened a folder without glancing at it, and looked at her.
"Your credentials are strong," he said. "Three years at the Herald. Shortlisted for the Laine Award. You left journalism six months ago." A pause with weight in it. "Why."
"I wanted something different."
"Corporate communications is an unusual direction for someone with your instincts."
"I like understanding how powerful companies shape their stories," she said. "And what they choose to leave out."
Something moved behind his eyes. Quick and controlled and gone before she could name it.
"I want honesty in this role," he said. "Not agreeableness. Not careful people who tell me what they think I want to hear. This office has had enough of those." He turned the folder around and slid it across the desk. "Read clause seven before you sign."
Zara turned to clause seven.
It was almost entirely blacked out. Four dense lines of solid ink where the terms should have been, leaving nothing legible except the clause number at the top and a single word at the bottom that might have been conditions or might have been something else entirely.
She looked up. "What does it say."
Something crossed his face that was almost an expression. It did not reach his eyes.
"Sign the contract," he said, "and you will find out."
She looked at the page for three seconds. She thought briefly of her father sitting at his kitchen table the year she turned nineteen, looking at his hands like they belonged to someone he did not recognise, and she thought about the twenty years of work those hands had represented and what had been done to all of it. Then she picked up the pen, signed her name in one clean motion, and slid the folder back across to him without another word.
He took it. He looked at her signature. He looked at her face with an expression she could not read at all.
"Welcome to Voss Industries, Ms. Cole."
"I look forward to it, Mr. Voss."
She stood, picked up her bag, and walked to the door.
"One more thing."
She stopped but did not turn.
"I do not tolerate dishonesty," he said. "From anyone. Under any circumstances."
She turned just enough to meet his eyes over her shoulder. "Neither do I."
She walked out.
In the elevator going down, with the contract copy in her bag and her pulse still faster than she would admit, she allowed herself one quiet breath. Three years and she was finally inside his world.
She had no idea that upstairs, Damien Voss had already set her folder aside and opened a second one. Older. Thinner. A photograph paperclipped inside the cover.
Not a surveillance photograph. A personal one. Two men standing outside a building she recognised immediately. Her father on the left, younger, smiling. A younger Damien on the right.
They had known each other.
And Damien had been keeping the evidence of it for a very long time.
Last Chapters
#97 Chapter 97 Telling Emmanuel
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#96 Chapter 96 The Full Account
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#95 Chapter 95 The Care Facility
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#94 Chapter 94 Who Was First
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#93 Chapter 93 Ellis Boateng Moves
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#92 Chapter 92 What It Could Become
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#91 Chapter 91 The Cross Border Briefing
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#90 Chapter 90 The Oduya Family
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#89 Chapter 89 The Eighteenth Family
Last Updated: 7/8/2026#88 Chapter 88 Ellis Boateng
Last Updated: 7/8/2026
You Might Like 😍
The Game of Claiming
A drunken bet becomes their private game: win the maid.
The rules?
Don’t let the others know you’re falling for her.
And never, ever let her leave.
But each brother plays differently—
The eldest buys her obedience.
The second steals her breath.
The third corners her in the dark.
The youngest ruins anyone who touches her.
Lila isn’t sure if she’s a player in their game… or the prize they’ll destroy each other to claim
Lightborn: The Demon’s Bond
The Spy Who Left
"I still can't believe she actually did it. Aria Hart, filing for divorce. Who saw that coming?"
"How long do we think it'll take before she comes crawling back?" Another voice joins the conversation.
"Three days," Victoria declares. "Five at most. She has no money, no skills, no family. Where's she going to go?"
When Aria Chen divorced billionaire Leon Hart, New York's elite sneered, betting she'd crawl back within days. She never did.
Three years later, the world is rocked when Dr. Aria Vale, CEO of a revolutionary cybersecurity empire, steps into the spotlight. The mysterious genius who built a billion-dollar company from nothing is none other than Leon's discarded wife, the woman everyone thought was just a pretty ornament.
Now, every powerful man wants the queen Leon threw away a renowned scientist seeking partnership, a financial titan proposing an empire, and an actor offering devotion. Each sees the brilliance Leon ignored.
Then Leon discovers the truth: Aria's sacrifices, her secret double life, and the daughter she's been raising without him. For the first time, the man who once took her for granted must fight for her love. But can he compete with men who valued her from the beginning?
A story of love, betrayal, and power where the king must kneel before the queen who never needed saving.
The Vampire Prince's Hybrid Bride
Bound by Fate, Freed by Choice
Her escape leads her to Alpha Rowan, the commanding leader of the Blackwood Pack, who offers shelter, protection, and an unexpected chance at a new life. But Rowan’s fierce and jealous fiancée sees Lyla as a threat, and the pack’s charming Beta is drawn to her quiet strength.
As a dangerous attraction simmers between Lyla and Rowan, they begin to unravel a dark web of secrets that implicates Kaiden and threatens both their worlds.
With her hidden power awakening, Lyla must navigate treacherous loyalties, face the alpha who shattered her, and decide: Will she follow the destiny fate forced upon her, or claim the love and strength she has chosen for herself?
Game of Destiny
When Finlay finds her, she is living among humans. He is smitten by the stubborn wolf that refuse to acknowledge his existence. She may not be his mate, but he wants her to be a part of his pack, latent wolf or not.
Amie cant resist the Alpha that comes into her life and drags her back into pack life. Not only does she find herself happier than she has been in a long time, her wolf finally comes to her. Finlay isn't her mate, but he becomes her best friend. Together with the other top wolves in the pack, they work to create the best and strongest pack.
When it's time for the pack games, the event that decides the packs rank for the coming ten year, Amie needs to face her old pack. When she sees the man that rejected her for the first time in ten years, everything she thought she knew is turned around. Amie and Finlay need to adapt to the new reality and find a way forward for their pack. But will the curve ball split them apart?
Taming Her Playboy Bully
To protect what’s mine
Soulbound Mark
Elena is a witch who adores flowers and plants, possessing a gentle kind of magic that is tied to nature. She leads a quiet life with her family—until one day, the peace is shattered. After a ruthless vampire kills her parents to obtain their magic, she barely escapes and is forced to go into hiding.
From that moment on, she lives in constant fear and does all she can to avoid vampires, afraid that her past may catch up with her one day.
However, Elena can’t escape her fate, and it leads her straight into the arms of yet another vampire. Their encounter throws her life into disarray—not only is Ryder her enemy, but he is also her destined soulmate.
COLD (Ruthless Player)
“Please… Nick, wait.” He pulled out, thrusted back in. “How much? Twenty thousand? Fifty? Hundred?” With every question, he thrust harder and harder. My neurons are frying with the confusing feeling in my brain. Torn between pleasure, fear, and panic. I couldn't utter a single sentence to save my life.
His cold eyes pinned me in place while he plundered my body with deep thrusts, which only added to my confusion. My dumb body mistook the mixed signals, my pussy becoming even wetter than before.
“I hope she'd paid you well, because I'm going to fuck you all night long, hard,” he growled. “Sleep, then do it all over again. I want to feel you come for me, Andrea, want to feel you squeeze my cock, milking me.
Begging for me to give you the high only I can, I'm going to fucked you until I fuck all my wife's money's worth, I want you to remember how hard I took you while you're meeting her.” I sobbed, moaned, and tried to scramble out under him.
“No, please…Nick, let….let me explain.” Nick abruptly pulled out. His eyes were cold but hooded.
Andrea was sent to take down billionaire magnate Nicklaus Montgomery.
Her mission was simple: get close, seduce him, find the proof, and disappear. Instead Andrea finds herself exposed—cornered into signing a contract that binds her to Nicklaus's side as his lover. Now she’s living in his world of wealth, danger, and secrets… and the deeper she falls into his bed, the harder it becomes to remember what side she's on.
A Queen Among Tides (Book 5 in the Gods' Saga)
Shocked to find he's been bound in more ways than one to Sebastian, the future King to the Kingdom of Atlesper, Lemuel resists Sebastian's advances at every turn, believing this may be one pairing Goddess Zarseti got wrong.
Lemuel will have to face his past in hopes of starting a new future, but an overly flirtatious King is the least of his worries when he learns Sebastian's parents are convinced that a conniving usurper disguised as a curvy blonde, is the future king's true soulmate.
A Queen Among Tides is the 5th book in the Queen Among Series/The Gods' Saga. This is an interconnected series. To see how it ends, I recommend reading the full series.
Books in the series order:
A Queen Among Alphas - Book 1
Bite-Size Luna - A Queen Among Alphas Prequel (available under book 1)
A Queen Among Snakes - Book 2
A Queen Among Blood - Book 3
A Queen Among Darkness - Book 4
Whole Again - A Queen Among Alpha's spin-off (available under book 1)
A Queen Among Tides - Book 5
Valor, Virtue, and Verve - Tides Prequel Spin-off (will be available under book 5)
A Queen Among Gods - Book 6
Runaway Empress - A Queen Among Snakes Prequel (will be available under book 2)
A Queen Among Tempests - Book 7
Dark Vocation - Darkness spin-off (will be available under book 4)
A Court of Arcane Souls Anthology (side character short stories exclusive to Ream)
Royal Shadow Series (Next Gen Coming Soon)
The Unwritten Princess
My name is Mia, and everything I touch is dying.
The flowers beneath my mother's window turned black overnight. The herbs I gathered at dawn rotted in my hands. When the court wizard finally told me the truth—that someone cursed me, that my presence would kill everyone I love—I realized the prophecy everyone believed was never meant to save the kingdom. It was meant to destroy me.
So I ran. Not to fulfill some destiny, but to survive it.
Now I'm traveling with a hunter who lost his companions to the same curse I carry, chasing fragments of a prophecy the Fae sing differently. An elf took a baby from the palace the night I was born. And somewhere between the lies I've been told and the truth I'm hunting, I'm starting to suspect: What if I'm not the princess from the prophecy at all?












