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CHAPTER FIFTY NINE : Natalie’s Message
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-08-29 16:09:48
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The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER FIFTY NINE : Natalie’s Message
KATE’S POVI read it twice.Then I handed the phone back to Leon because holding it any longer felt like holding something that needed to be put down before it burned through the hand.Natalie’s message was not what I’d expected.Not a threat. Not another carefully timed strike designed to destabilise everything we’d been trying to hold together. It was something else entirely, and the something else was worse in a specific way that threats never quite managed to be.It was an apology.Not the calculated kind. Not the kind that came wrapped in conditions or designed to create leverage. Just words, direct and unpolished, from a woman who by all accounts had spent the last several months being the most calculating person in any room she occupied.I read it in my head again from memory.I know you have no reason to believe anything I say. I know what tonight looked like and what the past few months looked like and I’m not going to try to reframe any of it. What I did was what I did. But
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT : Clara’s Letters
LEON’S POVNobody moved for a moment.Oliver stood in the middle of the kitchen holding that envelope with both hands, not extending it toward anyone, just holding it, like he’d carried it so long that putting it down required more decision than he currently had available.Fiona was looking at it.Not at Oliver. At the envelope specifically. The worn edges. The handling it had absorbed over three years of someone picking it up and putting it down and picking it up again.She knew what was in it. She’d known the moment she saw it.I stayed where I was, near the doorway, and didn’t speak. This wasn’t mine to manage. I’d been managing things all night, all week, all year, and I was beginning to understand that some rooms needed to find their own shape without someone arranging the furniture.Kate was beside me. Still. Watching.Oliver looked at Fiona.“She wrote to you,” he said. “My mother. Right up until she got sick.” He paused. “I didn’t understand the letters at first. Some of them
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN : Oliver And Fiona
KATE’S POVI was already moving toward the door.Leon caught my arm. Not stopping me, just slowing me down enough to think.“Bryan’s following him,” he said.“I know.”“We have people at the estate.”“I know that too.” I looked at him. “But Fiona is there alone and Oliver has been building toward something for weeks and whatever he thinks he’s going to get from her tonight, she’s not prepared for it. She’s never been prepared for Oliver when he’s like this.”Leon held my gaze for a second.Then he let go of my arm.We said brief things to Wakefield about the files, about not moving them, about independent counsel arriving in the morning. Stefena said she would stay. Justin said the same, which surprised me until I looked at him properly and understood that what he needed right now was to be in the same room as those folders, close to the truth about his mother in whatever form it currently existed, and that was a need I wasn’t going to argue with.Carter said nothing about staying or
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER FIFTY SIX : Wakefield’s Terms
LEON’S POVNobody moved for a moment.Wakefield stood on that step looking at our car with the expression of a man who had prepared for this specific moment and was now finding the reality of it slightly different from the preparation. Not frightened. Not confident either. Something between the two that hadn’t decided which direction to fall yet.I got out first.The night air was cold. The residential street was completely still around us, curtains drawn in every house, the ordinary world doing its ordinary thing, indifferent as always.Kate got out beside me. Carter came out of the back slowly, and I heard the moment Wakefield clocked him, a small shift in his posture, the recalculation of someone who hadn’t known Carter would be in that car.Good. Surprises ran both directions tonight.Stefena looked at me when I reached the step. Her composure was back, mostly, the familiar architecture of it reconstructed over whatever the past few hours had actually cost her. But it was thinner
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE : The Drive
KATE’S POVWe put Carter in the back seat.Not roughly. Not with any particular ceremony either. Leon just opened the rear door and Carter got in and that was the shape of it, a man who had run out of options sitting quietly while the people he’d been outmanoeuvring all night drove him somewhere he’d been hoping not to go.Leon took the wheel. I sat beside him. Nobody spoke for the first few minutes.The city at this hour was thin and unhurried, mostly empty roads and amber streetlights doing their patient work. I watched it move past the window and thought about nothing specific, which wasn’t accurate, I was thinking about several things simultaneously but none of them had resolved into anything I could hold properly yet.Carter’s letter in Leon’s pocket.Stefena’s voice on the phone, stripped of every layer she usually kept between herself and the world.Justin in a room somewhere with a borrowed phone and thirty seconds to say one name.The name he’d said.I glanced at Leon. His ey
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR : The Study
LEON’S POVThe front door was unlocked.I’d locked it myself before we left for the marina. I knew exactly what that meant but I didn’t say it out loud. Just pushed the door open slowly and stepped inside.The entrance hall was dark.No sounds. No movement. Just the particular quality of a house that had someone in it trying very hard to seem empty.Kate was behind me. Close. I could feel her presence without looking back and I was glad for it in a way I hadn’t expected to be, the specific steadiness of having someone beside you whose instincts you’d learned to trust.I moved down the hallway.The study door was closed. Light had been coming from under it thirty seconds ago. Now nothing. Which meant either Carter had finished what he came for, or he’d heard the car and killed the light and was standing on the other side of that door right now doing exactly what I was doing.Waiting.I stopped outside it.Put my hand on the handle.Opened it.Carter was standing at the desk.Not rummag
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER TWENTY SIX : Missing
KATE’S POVI watched Leon’s face change.It was subtle, the way his expressions always were, but I had been paying enough attention over the past few weeks to catch it. The slight tightening around his eyes. The way his jaw set a fraction harder than usual. The stillness that came over him that was
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER ELEVEN : The Photograph
The silence at the table lasted too long. I could feel everyone in the room waiting. Carter had gone very still. Bryan had set down his glass without making a sound. Even the staff near the far wall seemed to have stopped breathing. And Leon. Leon hadn’t moved. Hadn’t spoken. But something abou
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER SEVEN : The Return
LeonI know I’m rigid on the outside, I know how calculated I am but that doesn't mean I lack blood running through my veins and emotions. Nights were terror to me, my thoughts deprived me of sleep and my heart beat never rested. I really don't care about my ex-girlfriend and her stunts, I know I
The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate) CHAPTER ONE : Growing Up Next door
KATELeon Romano never apologized.Not when he ignored me. Not when he humiliated me. And definitely not when he ruined the few things I had.To the world, I was Kate Adams, daughter of Jared and Fiona Adams.To Leon Romano, I was just Katie.And my parents?“Nanny.” “Driver.”I remember vividly t
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