Priced By My Billionaire Nemesis のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

The hallway smells like my mother’s strong black tea—comforting on normal days, suffocating on mornings like this. My steps feel fragile on the worn tiles, and for a moment I think about turning around and hiding in my room again. But hiding never paid a debt. Hiding never spared my father the bruises. Hiding sure as hell won’t fix anything now.I inhale, paste on something that resembles a smile, and step into the kitchen.My parents sit at the small wooden table—the one we’ve kept for twenty years because replacing it costs money we’ll never have. My mother is pouring tea into three mismatched mugs, her hand trembling just enough that she tries to hide it behind a sigh. My father sits across from her, glasses halfway down his nose as he sorts through medical bills and grocery receipts. His skin looks pale, washed out, like the night stole more from him than he can afford to lose.They look up as I enter.“Good morning, my love,” my mother says, her smile tight around the edges, eyes

The elevator doors slid shut with a soft mechanical sigh, sealing off the corridor—and the woman standing in it—with a finality that hit Adrian in places he’d thought were long dead. His mother let out a breath so faint it barely stirred the air between them, leaning her thin back against the cool metal wall. Even in her illness, she was regal—scarf tied neatly, posture long-trained into elegance—but her hand trembled slightly as it rested atop her abdomen, as though sheer determination could keep the sickness from advancing another inch.“You could have greeted the young woman properly,” she murmured, her voice calm but edged with disapproval.Adrian’s jaw tightened until a dull ache spread across the hinge. “It wasn’t necessary.”His mother hummed—a quiet, unimpressed sound that had haunted him since childhood. She turned her head, studying him with eyes that were too sharp for someone supposedly weakened by chemo. The look stripped away layers he’d spent years building, the kind he

The ride home should have been quiet. His mother, exhausted from the long day, leaned her head against the leather headrest with her eyes closed. The soft hum of the engine should have been soothing. The streetlights passing overhead should have been familiar, a rhythm he’d driven through thousands of times.Instead, they flickered through the windshield like interrogation lamps, each one illuminating another fracture in the composure Adrian had spent eight years perfecting.He tightened his grip on the steering wheel until his knuckles went pale. His mother seemed to be resting, but he could feel her watching him in the faint shifts of her breathing, the small turns of her head each time a muscle jumped in his jaw.“Are you going to tell me what that was?” she asked softly, without accusation. That softness was always the weapon he failed to defend against.He kept driving.“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, calm but strained, his voice carrying that clipped precision he used in boa

The door opens with a quiet, well-rehearsed sweep, and Jaden’s secretary enters carrying a silver tray so polished it could blind. The teapot gleams like something ceremonial, the porcelain cups arranged with surgical precision beside a neat stack of biscuits and a bowl of sugared almonds. Even the steam rising from the pot curls upward as if choreographed.She sets everything down silently and leaves without lifting her eyes to me.Of course she doesn’t. Nobody looks at prey in the spider’s web.The door clicks shut. The room stills.Jaden remains leaned back in his chair, elbow resting on the armrest, fingers steepled lightly under his chin. Now that we’re alone, his attention sharpens in a way that feels almost physical—like a spotlight focused directly on my pulse.“Drink,” he says, voice low and velvety. “You need it.”I straighten my back, spine stiffening automatically as if posture could shield me. I reach for the cup, keeping my movements controlled, deliberate. But my finger

The drive to the hospital should have taken twenty minutes, but today it stretched into something slower, heavier—an agonizing crawl through a world that seemed to dim itself in sympathy with her fading strength. Even the traffic lights felt slower. The cars around them moved as if underwater, trapped in the same thick grief that clung to his shoulders.The sky was pale and washed-out, a soft winter gray that looked as if someone had siphoned the color out of it, the same way illness had been draining the vitality from his mother.She sat in the passenger seat with her head leaned against the window, the scarf around her hair shifting every time she exhaled. She never used to wear scarves. She used to joke that they made her look like a Victorian widow or a fragile woman from an old oil painting. Now she wore them because the cold irritated her scalp. Because her skin bruised too easily. Because even the wind felt heavier on her bones.He remembered her tossing scarves across the room