Lahat ng Kabanata ng Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

I finish the rest of dinner with Mr. Sutton pretending I am not coming apart at the seams, pretending I am not being silently eviscerated across the room by a man who once swore he would never hurt me and is now apparently auditioning for the role of Judge, Jury, and Executioner in the Lena Hale Is Trash courtroom in his head. I smile at all the right moments, nod in the appropriate places, and toss in a polite, “Really? That must have been terrifying,” even though I barely register half the words leaving this elderly man’s mouth. My attention keeps snapping back to the way Adrian looked at me in the lobby, like I had crawled out of a gutter and offered to mop the marble with my hair.Mr. Sutton could be telling me about his hedge fund years or confessing that he was once a jewel thief and I would not know the difference. All I hear is the blood pounding in my ears and the constant, nauseating hum of awareness that Adrian Vale is somewhere in this hotel, waiting like a debt collector w

The elevator feels like a metal throat swallowing me floor by floor, and I am the idiot walking willingly into the stomach. The mirrored walls throw my reflection back at me from every angle, catching every uneven breath and every tiny twitch of uncertainty I keep trying to iron out of my face. I square my shoulders and tilt my chin as if posture alone could disguise the fact that I am completely out of my depth. The woman in the glass tries to look expensive and unbothered. The woman inside the skin knows she is neither.I should have gone home instead of pressing that keycard to the reader. I should have taken the money, blocked a number I do not even have anymore, and pretended this night never happened. I should have told Mia to find someone else to play dress up with lonely old men in hotel dining rooms. Instead, I used the key, because apparently I have a habit of making catastrophic choices in tall buildings. If there is a bad decision waiting above the twentieth floor, I will f

I do not move.The sentence lands like a physical impact, harder than any insult he could have chosen and somehow heavier because of the deliberate calm. For a second, my lungs forget how to work. My pride claws desperately for something clever and cutting to throw back at him, but the part of me that lives on numbers and overdue notices and threats is already counting zeroes like oxygen.He tilts his hand a fraction, the check still hanging there like bait. “Go on,” he says, quiet and merciless. “Isn’t this what you came for?”I hate him in that moment with a purity that frightens me. I hate the way he looks at me, as if he has me pinned to a board under glass. I hate that he thinks he has me all figured out. I hate that he might be right in the only way that matters tonight.My hand lifts. It shakes, no matter how hard I try to will it steady, and that humiliation burns almost more than everything else. I close my fingers around the paper, feeling the crispness of it, the weight that

The taxi drops me at the curb of our street, the kind of narrow, dimly lit neighborhood where the streetlamps flicker like they’re paid hourly and currently debating whether to quit mid-shift. The night air smells faintly of dust and someone grilling two blocks away, the ordinary hum of life that feels like a foreign language after the penthouse.The house looks smaller tonight. It always looks small, but tonight it looks compressed, like it’s tucking itself inward, bracing for whatever version of me walks through the door. The living room window glows faintly—warm, familiar, worn around the edges from years of use—but no shadows move behind it. Good. They’re asleep. I don’t have the strength for my mother’s well-meaning chatter or my father’s quiet, exhausted scanning of my face, searching for signs of new disaster. Their hope is a fragile thing I don’t have the heart to shatter tonight.The key sticks in the lock the way it always does, catching in the mechanism like it, too, is tire

I wake to sunlight cutting through my thin curtains, harsh and unwelcome. It is the kind of light that does not comfort you. It exposes you. My head pounds behind my eyes, my throat feels scraped raw, and my mouth tastes metallic, like I spent the night chewing iron instead of sleeping. I blink against the glare and want to roll over and disappear, but the day has already begun without me. It is loud, intrusive, and completely indifferent to the fact that I went through hell twelve hours ago. I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, trying to convince myself that last night actually happened. That Adrian’s voice really cut through me. That I really walked out of his penthouse carrying checks that feel more like restraints than relief. I push the blanket aside and sit up slowly. The mattress springs groan as if they resent me for waking. The house is already awake. Voices and movement bleed through the walls. The kettle whistles in the kitchen. My mother clatters dishes in that tens