บททั้งหมดของ Too Late To Love Me, Mr Billionaire : บทที่ 211 - บทที่ 220

Kira’s POVElijah’s restaurant, solace was dark when the car pulled up outside.Not closed dark, just after hours dark, the kind where the lights were off in the front of house but the kitchen strip was still on and throwing a warm line under the door, and Kira sat in the Cullinan for a moment and looked at it.She knew what this was.She’d known from the moment Elijah texted on Tuesday and said are you free Saturday evening, just the two of us, and she’d said yes because she always said yes to him and because she’d spent two days telling herself she didn’t know what it meant and had known the entire time.She got out of the car.Elijah opened the door before she reached it, which meant he’d been watching for her, and he stepped back and she walked in and stopped.One table in the middle of the empty restaurant, dressed properly, white cloth and candles and two settings and a single small arrangement of something green and simple in the center that didn’t try too hard. The rest of Sol

Kira’s POVShe woke at four again.She knew before she opened her eyes because her body had started doing it with the reliability of an alarm, the same time every night for a week, pulling her up out of sleep into the dark ceiling of her bedroom and the quiet of the house. Elijah was asleep beside her tonight. He decided to spend the night.She turned her hand over slowly and looked at the ring in the dark, the emerald catching nothing because there was nothing to catch, just the shape of it on her finger, and she lay there and did what she’d been doing for a week, running her thumb across the band and waiting for the feeling to arrive completely.It didn’t arrive completely.It arrived mostly. It arrived enough that during the day she didn’t notice the gap, during service and school pickup and the autumn menu and the knife class on Thursdays and dinner with Marcus on Fridays, during all of it she was fine, genuinely fine, and the ring sat on her finger and felt like hers and Elijah w

Kira’s POV Alyssa’s text said come see and nothing else mattered as Kira drove to Brooklyn in the new Rolls Royce with the radio off and the early morning city moving past the windows and her finger still feeling lighter than it had in three weeks. She parked outside and sat for a moment. The restaurant was dark inside, a closed sign on the door, the street still doing its early morning thing, a delivery van two doors down, a woman walking fast with coffee, the ordinary unremarkable beginning of a Tuesday. She got out and let herself in through the kitchen entrance. The kitchen smelled the way it always smelled before service, clean and ready, the particular smell of a space that knew what it was for and was waiting to do it, and she stood in the middle of it with her bag on her shoulder and her keys in her hand and looked at the counters and the pass and the equipment and the strip lighting and thought about the first time she stood in this space when it was still just a mere b

Kira's POV "Which hospital." Her voice didn't sound like her own. "Ma'am, I need you to stay calm. Your daughter is stable, she's being transported to Weslake Regional." "Where is that." "About an hour and twenty minutes from Brooklyn, ma'am." The phone nearly slipped out of her hand. "An hour and twenty minutes." "Kira?" Alyssa was already at her side, one hand on her arm. "What's wrong?" "Lily." The name came out cracked. "There's been an accident." "Oh my God." "I need my coat. I need my bag. I need..." Kira pressed her palm flat against her own chest like she could hold herself together with pressure alone. "I need a car." "I'll call Desmond right now." "Tell him to pull around front, don't wait for valet." Alyssa was already moving, phone to her ear, and Kira followed her out through the kitchen doors, past the chef who called after her, past the sous chef who half rose from checking a ticket, none of it registering, none of it mattering. The car was wait

Kira's POV “I need a fucking answer right now.” Adrian's voice echoed through the hallway. "Sir, if you can just take a seat, someone will be out to update you shortly." "I've been sitting for two hours." Adrian's voice had dropped low, the kind of low that made people around him go still. "My daughter came in unresponsive and nobody has told us a single thing since." "I understand your frustration, but I don't have access to her chart, I'm front desk staff, I can only…." "Then get me someone who does have a freaking access, oh my goodness ." Kira sat frozen in the chair, her hands pressed together so tightly her fingers had gone numb. Every time the doors down the hall opened she looked up, and every time it wasn't for them, something in her chest cracked a little further. "Adrian." "What." "Sit down. Please." "I'm not sitting down, Kira. Our daughter is somewhere behind that door and nobody will tell us if she's breathing on her own." He turned back to the recept