One Night with a Billionaire

Daphne The first thing I felt was pain. Not sharp, just a deep, throbbing ache that pulsed behind my eyes like an alarm I couldn’t turn off. My mouth was dry, my throat raw, and every sound in the room seemed louder than it should be. For a moment, I didn’t move. I just lay there, letting the unfamiliar softness beneath me register. This wasn’t my bed. My sheets weren’t silk. My apartment didn’t smell faintly of cologne and expensive wine. Something twisted in my stomach. I forced my eyes open. Light filtered through tall windows, pale and golden against the cream walls. A jacket hung over a chair, dark and perfectly tailored. Beside me, a white dress shirt lay half-crumpled on the floor. My heart began to race. Bits of the night started coming back in fragments, like pieces of a dream I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember. Music. Laughter. A glass in my hand that kept being refilled. Someone’s hand at the small of my back. A pair of dark eyes watching me like they already knew

Daphne The next morning, I woke up to silence. No ringing alarm, no chatter from the apartment next door, no clinking dishes from the café downstairs. Just the sound of my own breathing and the faint hum of the refrigerator in the next room. My head still felt heavy, but it wasn’t from wine this time. It was from everything I had been trying not to think about. I had spent the night on the bathroom floor, drifting between crying and staring at the ceiling until my eyes burned. When the sun rose, something inside me hardened. I couldn’t keep sitting there, waiting for the world to decide what would happen to me. I was pregnant. And he deserved to know. It was a thought that terrified me even as I stood up and forced myself to get ready. The idea of facing Zachary Moreau—of standing in front of him and saying the words out loud—felt impossible. But so did doing nothing. I showered, dressed in my cleanest clothes, and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. My reflection in the mirror

Daphne My heel snapped somewhere between the twelfth and thirteenth rejection. It happened mid-step, the cheap leather strap giving out with a sharp crack that sent me stumbling. I caught myself on a lamppost and just stood there for a second, blinking at the broken shoe dangling from my foot like it was the last straw. Maybe it was. By the time I limped over to a nearby bench, my legs ached, my blouse clung to my back, and my stomach had been growling for hours. The city around me was still alive with noise, horns, footsteps, voices, but all of it felt like it was happening far away. I sank onto the bench, took off both heels, and placed them beside me. The concrete was hot even through my stockings. My feet throbbed. The folder I had been clutching all day slipped from my lap, spilling a few creased résumés onto the ground. I stared at them, then laughed softly to myself. The kind of laugh that did not really sound like laughter at all. I had spent the last three days wal