Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 121 - チャプター 130

Lena did not wake.Her body remained slack and unresponsive, her awareness held firmly out of reach as time continued without her. Whatever had been used to subdue her still governed her completely, keeping her suspended in a state where sensation arrived without meaning and memory failed to form. She did not react when her position changed or when the air around her cooled as night brushed briefly against her skin. Her breathing stayed shallow and even, the only sign that she was still physically present.Inside the hospital, Jaden moved with practiced restraint.He settled Lena into a wheelchair, adjusting her posture carefully so her head rested against the padded back, her chin angled just enough to suggest fatigue rather than unconsciousness. He positioned her arms so they appeared relaxed rather than slack and drew her coat around her shoulders to conceal how little of her own weight she was carrying. To anyone passing, she looked unwell but not alarming, another patient being e

Time behaved strangely in the house, and I became aware of it not through clocks or schedules, but through my body’s confusion. There was no visible way to tell the hour, no digital display, no ticking sound hidden in the walls. Light filtered through the windows in a way that felt curated rather than natural, brightening and dimming without reference points, as though someone else had decided how much daylight I was allowed to perceive. I found myself counting breaths and footsteps, measuring the space between meals and visits from the staff, trying to anchor myself to something consistent.The women never announced themselves. One moment I would be alone, standing at the window or sitting at the table, and the next there would be someone moving quietly through the room, as if she had always been there. Their voices were soft, their movements efficient, and their expressions composed to the point of neutrality. Nothing about their presence invited familiarity. Nothing about it allowe

Lena remained unconscious as the car crossed the state line.The journey unfolded without urgency. The driver maintained a steady pace, choosing secondary roads that curved through long stretches of darkness where traffic thinned and cameras became rare. These were the roads people used when they wanted to arrive somewhere without explanation. Night travel reduced questions. Fatigue dulled attention. By the time the hours began to blur together, the car had passed through places where fewer eyes lingered and fewer records were kept.Lena’s head rested at an awkward angle at first. Jaden adjusted it without hesitation, checking her breathing until he was satisfied it remained slow and even. When the road grew uneven, he shifted her weight so her body would not strain. As the temperature dropped with the rising elevation, he turned up the heat and covered her with his jacket. He did not speak. There was no need to narrate what was already decided.After several hours, the route narrowed.

Once Adrian accepted that there would be no sudden breakthrough, his attention shifted in a way he did not consciously choose. The part of him that waited for new information, for external validation, for some procedural correction that would restore order, went quiet. In its place, something older and far more dangerous took over, the kind of mental precision that had built his career and hardened his instincts. He stopped asking what had not yet been discovered and began interrogating what he had already seen and chosen not to understand.The surveillance footage did not return to him as narrative or sequence. It returned as texture, as the roughness of the grain and the slight distortion at the edge of the frame, as the angle that revealed movement without intention and withheld everything that might have made it simple. Lena’s body stepping backward, not struggling, not reacting with panic, but yielding space. The child stumbling away moments later, crying loudly enough to echo in

Adrian returned to Lena’s parents’ house the next day with two bags of groceries and no plan for what to say. He told himself the food was practical, that it was easier to arrive with something concrete than with empty hands and hollow apologies. He told himself that being useful was better than hovering, that action was preferable to presence. He told himself he was not doing this to punish himself, even though the thought had crossed his mind more than once. The lies came automatically now, smooth and rehearsed, and he hated them the moment they formed because they sounded too much like the excuses he had always made for himself.Her mother opened the door before he knocked, as though she had been waiting behind it, listening for his car. Her eyes were swollen again, red-rimmed and exhausted, but she stood straighter than she had the first time he came, wiping her hands on a dish towel like movement was the only thing keeping her anchored.“You didn’t have to,” she said, even as she