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Chapter Eleven — Calculations

作者: Banas
last update 最終更新日: 2025-12-05 16:41:41

The hallway smells like my mother’s strong black tea—comforting on normal days, suffocating on mornings like this. My steps feel fragile on the worn tiles, and for a moment I think about turning around and hiding in my room again. But hiding never paid a debt. Hiding never spared my father the bruises. Hiding sure as hell won’t fix anything now.

I inhale, paste on something that resembles a smile, and step into the kitchen.

My parents sit at the small wooden table—the one we’ve kept for twenty years because replacing it costs money we’ll never have. My mother is pouring tea into three mismatched mugs, her hand trembling just enough that she tries to hide it behind a sigh. My father sits across from her, glasses halfway down his nose as he sorts through medical bills and grocery receipts. His skin looks pale, washed out, like the night stole more from him than he can afford to lose.

They look up as I enter.

“Good morning, my love,” my mother says, her smile tight around the edges, eyes
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  • Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis   Chapter Twelve — The Math

    The apples feel heavier than they should—three bright, harmless spheres in a cheap plastic bag, digging into the tender flesh of my palm. My pulse hasn’t steadied since the moment the elevator doors closed on Adrian and his impossibly elegant mother. I stand rooted to the spot in the hospital corridor, trying to breathe normally, trying to pretend my insides didn’t twist into a tight, burning knot the instant I saw him soften beside her.Of course he has a soft side. He just never spent it on me.The sight of him holding his mother’s elbow with quiet care, adjusting her scarf so gently it made my chest ache… it felt like watching an alternate universe. A version of him I never got. A version I never deserved in his mind.I push the feeling away—hard—and start toward Mia’s mother’s room. The corridor smells like antiseptic and overcooked vegetables, the universal perfume of hospitals. The farther I walk, the easier my lungs work, until finally I push through the doorway and Mia is ther

  • Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis   Chapter Eleven — Calculations

    The hallway smells like my mother’s strong black tea—comforting on normal days, suffocating on mornings like this. My steps feel fragile on the worn tiles, and for a moment I think about turning around and hiding in my room again. But hiding never paid a debt. Hiding never spared my father the bruises. Hiding sure as hell won’t fix anything now.I inhale, paste on something that resembles a smile, and step into the kitchen.My parents sit at the small wooden table—the one we’ve kept for twenty years because replacing it costs money we’ll never have. My mother is pouring tea into three mismatched mugs, her hand trembling just enough that she tries to hide it behind a sigh. My father sits across from her, glasses halfway down his nose as he sorts through medical bills and grocery receipts. His skin looks pale, washed out, like the night stole more from him than he can afford to lose.They look up as I enter.“Good morning, my love,” my mother says, her smile tight around the edges, eyes

  • Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis   Chapter Ten — Dawn 

    I wake to sunlight stabbing through my thin curtains, vicious and uninvited—the kind that doesn’t warm you so much as interrogate you. My head throbs with a pulse of its own, beating behind my eyes while my throat feels scraped raw, and my mouth tastes like I spent the night chewing metal shavings instead of sleeping. I blink against the glare, wanting to roll over and disappear, but the day has already started without me—loud, intrusive, and completely indifferent to the fact that I went through hell twelve hours ago. As I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, I try to convince myself that last night was real—that Adrian’s voice actually carved through me, that I actually walked out of his penthouse carrying checks that feel like handcuffs.I shove the blanket off and sit up slowly, the mattress springs groaning under my weight like they resent being disturbed. The house is already alive—voices and movement bleeding through the walls as the kettle whistles its shrill morning an

  • Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis   Chapter Nine — The Half-Dream

    It begins the same way it always does, with a door that materializes out of the dark, a hallway that stretches too long to be real, and a voice that reaches me before the rest of the dream assembles itself. It is never the voice from tonight, never the cold, polished cruelty he used in the penthouse. Dream-Adrian comes from another lifetime. He is sharper, younger, more volatile, and more easily wounded. He is breakable in a way the present version of him pretends he has never been, and in the dream he is always on the edge of breaking again.In the dream he appears the way he existed eight years ago, yet the outlines of him are warped, sharpened by memory, and twisted by all the things we never said. The years between then and now distort him, blending the boy he was with the man who stared me down hours ago. What I see is a hybrid of both, overlaid like projections that cannot quite align. It leaves me with a sensation of wrongness, as if my mind refuses to decide which version is t

  • Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis   Chapter Eight — The Night House

    The taxi drops me at the curb of our street, the kind of narrow, dimly lit neighborhood where the streetlamps flicker like they’re paid hourly and currently debating whether to quit mid-shift. The night air smells faintly of dust and someone grilling two blocks away, the ordinary hum of life that feels like a foreign language after the penthouse.The house looks smaller tonight. It always looks small, but tonight it looks compressed, like it’s tucking itself inward, bracing for whatever version of me walks through the door. The living room window glows faintly—warm, familiar, worn around the edges from years of use—but no shadows move behind it. Good. They’re asleep. I don’t have the strength for my mother’s well-meaning chatter or my father’s quiet, exhausted scanning of my face, searching for signs of new disaster. Their hope is a fragile thing I don’t have the heart to shatter tonight.The key sticks in the lock the way it always does, catching in the mechanism like it, too, is tir

  • Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis   Chapter Seven — Aftermath

    My lungs seize for a second. I do not move.He lifts one brow, and there is no arousal in the look, only expectation and contempt. “Or do we draw the line here,” he asks, “after millions in imaginary morals and twenty-five thousand in actual cash?”The humiliation is so intense it makes my skin feel too tight. I step toward him again because the alternative is walking out without the money and without any way to fix the mess that keeps my parents awake at night. My hands feel numb as I lift them to the row of buttons down his shirtfront.The first button comes undone more easily than I expect. The fabric parts a fraction of an inch, revealing a sliver of skin and the edge of his collarbone. My throat tightens. I move to the next button, then the next, forcing my fingers to keep going as my brain screams at me to stop.He stands utterly still. He does not help and he does not back away. He simply lets me undo him, one small plastic circle at a time, as if this is all a clinical experim

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