All Chapters of Billionaire Fake Marriage: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Zane's POVI had her out of the house in under four minutes.Not unkindly — I wasn't cruel to her, I had never been cruel to her, which had historically been part of the problem — but with the firm, deliberate efficiency of a man who had seen Skylar's expression shift and knew exactly what it meant and needed to manage the situation before it became something it couldn't be walked back from.I had seen Skylar's face in the moment I said the words.She's Kai's mother.Two seconds. Maybe three. The kind of stillness that isn't calm — the kind that comes just before something breaks. And then she had excused herself with a composure that cost her something, I could see it costing her, and walked out of the room with her chin level and her hands steady and I had felt something I didn't have an immediate name for watching her go.I put that away for later.Kate was standing in my compound with five years of absence on her shoulders and an expression that wanted me to see remorse and wouldn'

Skylar's POVI had paced the length of the bedroom so many times I was surprised there wasn't a groove in the floor.The house was quiet. The kind of quiet that amplifies everything — the ticking of the hallway clock, the hum of the refrigerator two floors down, the specific silence of a bed that should have had two people in it and didn't.Zane hadn't come home.I checked my phone again. The message was still there, unchanged, as though I'd somehow hoped it would be different on the fourteenth reading.Something came up. Won't be home tonight. Staying out with Kate.I set the phone face-down on the nightstand.Picked it up again.Put it down."Aunty Skylar?"I turned.Kai was standing in the doorway in his pajamas, hair flattened on one side, eyes still half-soft with sleep but alert in the way his eyes got when he sensed something was wrong. He had his father's eyes — that same quality of seeing more than he was supposed to."Hey." I smoothed my expression into something functional.

Zain's POVThe house was too quiet.I sat in the living room with a glass of whiskey I hadn't touched, still in my work shirt with the top two buttons undone, tie loosened, the kind of tired that sleep couldn't fix. The kind that sat behind your eyes and made everything feel slightly out of focus.Skyler's door had been closed since morning.I knew she was awake. I could hear the occasional creak of the floorboard near her window — the one she always stood at when her mind was too full to sit down. I had learned that about her without meaning to. The way I had learned that she took her coffee with too much sugar. That she hummed under her breath when she was concentrating on a document. That when she was truly angry, she went quiet, not loud.She was very quiet today.I deserved that. I knew I did. I just couldn't find the architecture for an apology. I had never been good at them. My father wasn't either, and I had grown up watching him express regret through expensive gifts and strat

Skyler's POVI didn't sleep.Not really. I drifted in and out of something shallow and restless, the kind of half-sleep where your mind keeps running even though your body has given up. Somewhere around three in the morning I heard Zain's footsteps pass my door, slow and deliberate, and then stop. I held my breath without meaning to.He didn't knock.After a moment, the footsteps continued down the hall toward his room, and I released the breath slowly into the dark ceiling above me.By six I was up, showered, and dressed in my work clothes out of habit, even though I had no clear plan for the day. Getting dressed felt like an act of intention. Like telling myself that whatever was coming, I would be upright for it.I went to the kitchen and made coffee — too much sugar, the way I always had it, the way he had noticed and never commented on but somehow always remembered when he poured it for me — and I stood at the counter and looked at my phone.Seventeen notifications. Most of them

Skyler's POVThe thing about trying to hold yourself together was that it required constant, exhausting maintenance.By Thursday I had developed a system. Wake up before Zain. Coffee with too much sugar. Thirty minutes at the window where I let myself feel everything I wasn't going to feel for the rest of the day. Then I put it all in a box, somewhere behind my sternum, and I went to work.It was not a healthy system. But it was functional, and functional was what I had.The office had a different texture this week. People looked at me differently — not unkindly, mostly, but with that particular sideways attention that meant they had seen the press coverage and were trying to reconcile the Skyler they knew, the one who brought the wrong coffee order to meetings and stayed late to fix other people's filing errors, with the woman in the headlines. Zain Hills' Secret Wife. The tabloids had given me a title before I had figured out what I actually was.I kept my head down. Answered emails