Chapter 78

Lila’s POV

He didn’t answer.

Not at first.

After I asked if he wasn’t tired of this game, he just stood there, frozen. His hand tightened on the strap of his briefcase, the leather creaking faintly under the strain. His back remained to me, tall and unyielding, his shadow stretching long across the polished floor.

The silence pressed in harder.

My chest ached. My jaw clenched. If this was another round of him pretending I didn’t exist, then I was done.

I took a sharp breath, the words spilling out before I could hold them back.

“If you’re angry at me, then say it!” My voice cracked against the walls. “Shout at me, curse me, do anything, but don’t just stand there acting like I’m invisible. This silence…” I faltered, pressing a hand to my chest. “It’s eating me alive, Drew. I can’t keep living in a house where I’m treated like I’m nothing.”

He still didn’t move. My frustration turned desperate, my voice trembling as the words slipped raw out of me.

“Do you know what’s worse?” I whispered. “I would rather be at the mercy of Max than be treated this way by you.”

That did it.

His steps stood still. His shoulders shifted, heavy, and then. slowly he turned.

I braced myself for fire. For the explosion of anger I thought had been simmering all this while. For the harsh words, the cold fury, and I was expecting to see the man who always knew how to cut the ground from under me.

But what I saw froze me.

His face… wasn’t angry.

It was broken.

The sharpness I had come to expect wasn’t there. Instead, his features looked weighed down, dragged by something far heavier than fury. His eyes weren’t blazing, they were tired, rimmed with something that looked too much like pain. His shoulders slumped, as though the steel rod that usually kept him so tall and untouchable had finally bent under pressure.

He walked back slowly, each step deliberate, like his own body resisted moving closer. When he reached the sofa, he sank into it, not with the elegance of Drew Sinclair the business tycoon, but with the heaviness of a man carrying a storm inside him.

For the first time in days, his eyes met mine directly.

“It’s not you I’m angry at,” he said quietly. His voice was low, husky, stripped of its usual edge. “It’s me. I’m angry at myself. And I don’t know how to control it. That’s why I’ve been quiet.”

The words hit me harder than if he had shouted.

I stared at him, stunned, the room spinning slightly around me. Drew, angry at himself? The man who controlled everything, who calculated every word, who never showed a single crack in his armour was sitting there confessing that he was battling himself?

It made no sense. But at the same time… It made perfect sense.

I leaned forward, searching his face for something, anything. “Why?” I whispered. “Why are you angry at yourself?”

His jaw tightened, the muscle ticking visibly. His eyes flickered down to the floor, then away, like the answer was too dangerous to give.

He didn’t speak.

The silence returned, thick and suffocating.

I swallowed hard, and before I could stop myself, the words slipped out. “Is it because of the sonogram?”

The reaction was immediate. His head snapped up, his eyes locking onto mine like a warning shot. His expression hardened, all those walls I had glimpsed moments ago slamming back into place. His lips pressed into a thin, unyielding line.

I froze, my heart hammering. I knew instantly I had touched something raw, something jagged, something he wasn’t ready for me to touch.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, my voice shaking. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it and I shouldn’t have even gone into your office in the first place.” My throat tightened. “I crossed a line. I’m sorry about that and I promise won’t bring it up again.”

The weight of my own words pressed on me. I shifted to my feet, ready to retreat, to give him space before I tore open something I couldn’t heal.

But then his voice stopped me.

“The sonogram…”

I froze mid step.

His tone wasn’t sharp this time. It was quiet. Pained. Fragile, almost, like every syllable cost him something.

I turned back, my breath caught in my chest.

Drew was still seated, elbows braced against his knees, his hands clasped so tightly together his knuckles were pale. His head was bowed, but when he finally looked up, his eyes—God, his eyes—looked nothing like the man I thought I knew.

“It’s mine.”

My mouth fell open.

The words rang in my ears, over and over, sinking like stones into water.

It was his. The sonogram wasn’t some distant memory or token of someone else’s story. It was his.

And then he said it.

“Mine and also Kimberley’s.”

The name hit me like a blow to the chest. Kimberley. The woman the world had known him with. The only relationship he had ever been publicly tied to. The one who had walked out of his life without reason and turned him into the cold heartless billionaire everyone knows today.

Shock made me sit back down, my knees were too weak to hold me and my mind turned in circles

“What… what happened?” My voice shook, barely audible. “If there was a child…Why doesn’t anyone know? Why do you only have that picture? Where is”

I couldn’t finish. The words got stuck in my throat.

His head lifted then, and when his gaze locked onto mine, my breath stopped. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with something rawer than anger. Grief. A grief so deep it looked like it had carved into the bone of him, shaping the man he had become.

His voice broke when he spoke, low and rough.

“Because that child was snatched away from me before I ever got to hold him in my hands.”