The Secret Billionaire Heiress Strikes Back のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 151 - チャプター 160

Chapter 152Dante got to his feet.It cost him everything he had left. The room tilted hard to one side and he put his good hand against the counter and breathed through it until the tilting slowed, and then he turned and saw R — saw the boy's face, white and wet and completely undone — and something in him that had been managing pain since the moment the door opened simply stopped managing it and ran toward his son instead."Hey," he said, getting down on one knee despite what it cost his ribs, pulling R into his arms even with blood still running warm down the side of his face. "Hey, buddy, I'm okay. Papa's okay. It's okay."R wasn't fooled. R had Ravyn's eyes for detail folded into a five-year-old's face, and he could see the blood and the way Dante's hand shook holding him and the way Dante's breath caught wrong every few seconds. He gripped two fistfuls of Dante's shirt and didn't let go, his small body wracked with sobs that came up from somewhere too deep for a child that age t

Chapter 154The cut above his eye needed stitches. Five of them. The doctor did it with the efficient calm of someone who had done this forty times this month and communicated through the specific shorthand of hospital competence.The ribs—two of them, which turned out to be the correct number, the previous assessment had been right—were now monitored and annoyed rather than monitored and stable.He was awake by the time Ravyn got to him. Awake, sitting up, with a shoulder that had been put back in place and was currently expressing the opinion that being put back in place was worse than being out of place, which was not accurate but was how it felt.He saw her in the doorway.Behind her, visible in the corridor through the door, R was sitting on a chair outside with Jayce. R had his knees up and was explaining something to Jayce with both hands, and Jayce was listening with the specific quality of someone giving their full attention to a child who was talking to them like a person.D

Chapter 156 — The Door InterruptsDante was sitting up when Jayce came in, which was new. For the first week it had been lying flat, propped on one elbow at most, the sling holding his shoulder still while his body did the slow business of putting itself back together. Now he was upright against the pillows, a tablet balanced on his knees with a half-finished lesson plan open on the screen, looking more like himself than he had in days.He looked up when the door opened, and something in his face did a complicated thing — pleased, and then immediately careful about being pleased."You're supposed to knock," Dante said."I did knock," Jayce said. "You didn't hear me because you were yelling at a worksheet.""It's not yelling. It's strong disagreement with whoever designed this color wheel activity." Dante set the tablet on the rolling table beside the bed. "How did you get past the desk this time?""I told them I was your physical therapist.""You don't look like a physical therapist."

Chapter 158Jayce held both hands up, slow and careful, the universal gesture of a man trying very hard not to look like a threat to someone barely three feet tall."I promise I'm not doing anything," he said. "Nothing bad. I would never—" He stopped, recalibrated, because R's expression suggested that vague reassurances were not going to be sufficient evidence. "I'm not hurting your papa. I would never hurt your papa."R did not move from his position in the doorway. He had his arms crossed in the specific way he'd clearly seen on television somewhere, an imitation of authority that would have been funny if his face hadn't been so genuinely serious underneath it."I got my eyes on you," R said. "I'm watching. Nobody hurts my papa anymore." His chin came up, and something in his small voice cracked slightly with the weight of what he was saying. "They hurt him two times. Two times, in front of me. And I'm not gonna let it happen again. I'll bite them. I'll bite so hard."Dante's amuse

Chapter 160Dante was in the kitchen when she came in, one-handed and slow about it, trying to get the lid off a jar of peanut butter with his bad shoulder tucked carefully against his body and his good hand doing work it wasn't built for alone. He looked up when she appeared in the doorway, and whatever he saw in her face made him set the jar down without finishing the job."What happened," he said. Not *what's wrong*. He'd learned, over the last few weeks, that *what happened* was the more honest question, the one that didn't give her room to say *nothing* and have it be believed."Nothing happened," she said. "Not tonight. But there's something I need to tell you, and I should have told you a long time before tonight."He pulled out a chair at the table, the same one she'd been sitting at twenty minutes earlier with the device open in front of her, and sat down slowly, watching her with the specific attention he gave things that mattered. "Okay."She sat across from him. She didn't