Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Secret Billionaire Heiress Strikes Back : Kabanata 111 - Kabanata 120

Chapter 112The grocery store had been Dante's idea of a productive afternoon.Simple. Manageable. The kind of task that required enough attention to keep his hands busy without demanding anything complicated from his brain, which was still processing the events of the past twenty-four hours with the sluggish efficiency of a system running too many programs simultaneously.His ribs ached with the persistent, bone-deep throb of injuries that hadn't had enough time to begin healing properly. He'd taken the maximum recommended dose of over-the-counter pain medication before leaving the apartment, which had taken the edge off without doing anything meaningful about the underlying damage. Moving carefully helped. Breathing shallowly helped. Pretending he was fine helped least of all but was the most socially necessary, so he was doing it anyway.R was in school. Ravyn was at work. The apartment was quiet in the way that felt like opportunity rather than emptiness, and Dante had decided tha

Chapter 114Jayce was quiet for a moment, rubbing his jaw with a hand that came away without blood, which meant Dante had hit him without doing real damage, which mostly served to remind him that Jayce was built like something that had been specifically engineered to absorb impact."I looked you up," Jayce said.Dante said nothing."Dante Archer," Jayce continued. "Younger brother of Miles Archer. Larsen family connections on the maternal side. Trust fund that's been sitting untouched for six years because you haven't accessed it since you walked out." He tilted his head. "Why are you here? Living in that building, teaching art to six-year-olds, doing grocery runs with cracked ribs?" He paused. "Because you have cracked ribs—I could tell when you pushed me. Someone worked you over recently. And you're still doing grocery runs and school pickups and living in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood your family would need a map to find.""I'm here because I chose to be here," Dante sa

Chapter 116He and Dante could go somewhere. Not this city, not with both their family histories layered through it. Somewhere else. Somewhere with different light and no accumulated context.Dante had talked about kids. Had mentioned, at some point in the two hours before the night became something else, the student who'd given him the drawing, had talked about the way children's brains worked with the affectionate specificity of someone who'd thought about it a lot. Jayce had filed that away as relevant. He'd looked into adoption, had pulled up preliminary information on his phone in the bathroom at two in the morning while Dante slept, had noted it as something to research properly when he had more time.He had been, in the span of about six hours, more concrete about a possible future than he'd been in the previous twenty-nine years combined.And then morning had arrived and Dante had gone.Not dramatically. No scene, no confrontation, no clear break that would have at least provi

Chapter 118The surveillance had been, up until approximately four-seventeen PM, entirely unremarkable.Phoenix had positioned himself with the patient efficiency of someone who'd done this kind of work long enough that the waiting had stopped feeling like waiting and started feeling like simply being somewhere with a purpose. He had a sightline to Dante's building, a coffee that had gone cold forty minutes ago, and a clear view of the street in both directions.Orion was two blocks over in the car, monitoring the secondary approach routes and maintaining communication through the earpiece that Phoenix wore with the practiced invisibility of long habit.It had been, as surveillance operations went, relatively straightforward. Dante moved with the careful deliberation of someone managing physical pain without wanting to make it visible—the cracked ribs announced themselves in the way he turned, the way he favored his left side when shifting his weight, the way he breathed with a slight

Chapter 120Phoenix said nothing, because Orion was right and they both knew it."And the things Jayce said," Orion continued, with the thoughtful cadence of someone working through implications carefully. "About what Dante had said that night. The things people say when they're in that specific context and they mean them." He tilted his head. "Dante didn't deny saying them. He said it was bed talk. He said he says those things to anyone who satisfies him. But he didn't say the feelings weren't real.""He said the feelings didn't transfer into daylight," Phoenix said."Which is a very specific and careful way to deny something," Orion said. "That's not the same as the feelings not existing. That's someone saying the context changed, not that what happened in the context wasn't genuine."They were both quiet for a moment."This is an extremely complicated situation," Phoenix said eventually."It has been a complicated situation since before we were involved in it," Orion said. "We're j