บททั้งหมดของ Too Late to Want Me; I chose your Billionaire Brother: บทที่ 111 - บทที่ 120

Benita couldn’t sleep.Not for lack of trying—but because her body refused to quiet down after everything that had been said. After the way Cillian had looked at her. Not like a man in love. Not like a man in denial either. But like someone who’d finally stopped running and hadn’t yet decided if that meant staying.It was enough to undo her, but not enough to let her rest.So Benita got up early. Tied her hair into something passable. Threw on her coat. And left before the city was even awake.There was something about walking through Oakland before sunrise that made her feel less alone. The streets still washed in a pink-tinted grey, the windows blank, the air not yet poisoned by headlines. For one brief hour, the world forgot what it thought of her. Of him. Of them.She stopped by a corner café, paid in cash, and left with a hot drink she didn’t taste. Her phone buzzed as she turned the corner toward the Bellington Group offices.KENT:You’re going to want to see this.She didn’t re

Benita sat in the back of the Bellington Foundation’s main office, cross-legged on the old suede couch no one ever used, staring at the quiet blue glow of her phone screen. No new messages. No missed calls. Just a dozen open tabs—articles, videos, retweets—all still orbiting the statement Cillian had released two days ago.The internet was fickle. Attention came in waves. And she knew better than to trust the tide. But something had shifted.Not in the world. In her.She’d spoken. She hadn’t flinched. And somehow, she hadn’t broken either.“Are you hiding?” Kent’s voice floated from the doorway.She glanced up. “Yes.”“Cool,” he said, stepping inside with two iced coffees. “Mind if I hide too?”She motioned to the other end of the couch. “Be my guest.”He handed her a cup and sat, sprawling like he owned the place. He didn’t ask how she was doing. Maybe because he already knew. Maybe because he also didn’t want to talk about it.They sat in companionable silence, the kind that only ca

No kettle humming in the background, no Kent whistling in the kitchen. Just the sound of her own breath, steady and unsure, as she leaned against the edge of the dining table and watched the clouds bunch over the Oakland skyline. Cillian was upstairs. Had been for over an hour. No footsteps overhead. No questions. No anger. Just silence. Benita didn’t know if she should feel relieved or terrified. Her phone buzzed against the table. She turned it over—another alert from the Tribune. The follow-up editorial had gone live ten minutes ago. A carefully balanced piece. Unbiased. Measured. Written like it had been boiled down to the safest version of the truth. “Both sides deserve to be heard.” But some voices had teeth sharper than others. Benita locked the phone and looked away. Outside, the late afternoon sun was doing its best to punch through the haze. It left streaks across the windows, golden and fractured. Nothing clean anymore. Nothing simple. She heard the creak of the up

She had forgotten what silence felt like when it wasn’t punishment.No cameras. No calls. No deadlines scratching at the edge of her mind. Just the soft hum of morning and the scrape of toast against a ceramic plate.Cillian was sitting at the other end of the kitchen island, scrolling through a structural draft like it might solve a problem he hadn’t yet named. His sleeves were rolled to the forearms. His hair was still wet from the shower. And for once, the air between them didn’t feel like a standoff.Benita took a bite of toast and watched him over her mug.“How many hours of sleep?” she asked.Cillian didn’t look up. “Enough.”“Liar.”That got a twitch of a smile. Small. But there.“I’ll sleep after the zoning appeal,” he muttered.“Sure. And I’ll stop worrying after I forget how.” She leaned her chin into her palm. “You know it’s okay to let yourself be still, right?”“I’m sitting, aren’t I?”“Your shoulders haven’t dropped since sunrise.”He looked up at that. Really looked.It

She wasn’t used to this quiet.Not the absence of noise—God knew her phone still buzzed every hour with emails and “urgent-but-not-really” calls—but the stillness inside. The way her mind wasn’t sprinting toward damage control or doubling back to retrace a lie. She wasn’t bracing for the next blow.It felt unnatural.Like standing in the eye of a storm that forgot to finish what it started.Benita leaned against the railing of the foundation’s rooftop terrace, the late afternoon sun casting a copper sheen across the city skyline. Behind her, the glass doors to the office were open just enough to let through the muffled sound of Syl’s voice on another logistics call. Kent had gone to meet with city contractors. And Cillian…He was downstairs, in a boardroom, being offered something that could either anchor them or split the entire building down the middle.A grant. A government grant with strings so fine they might as well be thread around a neck.She exhaled.Tried not to picture him