All Chapters of The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate): Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The silence at the table lasted too long. I could feel everyone in the room waiting. Carter had gone very still. Bryan had set down his glass without making a sound. Even the staff near the far wall seemed to have stopped breathing. And Leon. Leon hadn’t moved. Hadn’t spoken. But something about the quality of his stillness had changed entirely from the composed, controlled quiet I had grown used to. This was different. This was the kind of still that came just before something broke. I looked back at the photograph. It was taken from a distance, which meant someone had been watching. Waiting. The angle was deliberate, chosen carefully to make Oliver’s hand on my arm look like something it wasn’t. To make the closeness between us look like a choice I had made rather than a moment that had lasted less than thirty seconds outside a gate I hadn’t even invited him to. I knew exactly when it was taken. The morning after the wedding night. I had stepped outside briefly for air, stil

He was gone before I could process it.I stood in the kitchen for a long moment, listening to the sound of his car pulling away from the villa, the engine fading until there was nothing left but the quiet the house always returned to when he wasn’t in it.Stay inside. Don’t open the gate for anyone.I turned those words over slowly in my mind.Not a suggestion. Not concern dressed up as instruction. Something more urgent than both of those things, delivered in that low careful voice he only used when he was trying not to show that something had rattled him.Something had rattled him.I picked up my phone from the counter and looked at the message one more time before closing it. Then I set it face down and stood there, both hands pressed flat against the cool surface of the counter, trying to think clearly.Bryan had called. Leon’s expression had changed before he even said a word. And whatever Bryan had told him in those few seconds had been enough to pull him out of this kitchen mid

I didn’t go to my room.I know he expected me to. Leon had a way of giving instructions like they were already done, like the only thing left was for the other person to catch up and cooperate. But I was too tired for that tonight and too unsettled and I had spent the last hour sitting with something I couldn’t unknow, so I stayed where I was and watched him take the call.His back was half turned to me. Voice too low to make out.I couldn’t hear the words but I didn’t need to. I could see what it was doing to him. The way his free hand pressed flat against the desk like he needed the surface under it. The way he went completely still, not the controlled kind of still he usually carried around like armour, but the kind that happens when something lands harder than you were braced for.The call lasted less than two minutes.When it ended he didn’t turn around immediately. He stood there with his back to me, head slightly dropped, phone loose in his hand. Just standing there while the q

KATE’S POVI knew he said stay.I heard him say it clearly at the top of the stairs before he disappeared down the corridor and I had every intention of doing exactly that for approximately forty seconds before my feet decided otherwise.I told myself it was because I heard Sade’s voice and I wanted to make sure everything was fine. I told myself it was practical, reasonable, the kind of thing any person would do when strange sounds came from the ground floor of an unfamiliar house.But the truth was simpler than that.I didn’t like being left out of things that involved me. I never had. And whatever was happening downstairs had the specific quality of something that involved me very directly.So I came down.I took the stairs slowly, one hand trailing lightly along the railing, listening as I went. The entrance hall was empty when I reached the bottom. Sade was nowhere in sight. The front door was closed.But there were voices coming from the sitting room.Leon’s. Low and measured, t

KATE’S POVI looked at the photograph for a long time.Not because I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I understood it immediately. I think I understood it before my brain had fully processed the image, the way your body sometimes knows things before your mind catches up and gives them names.Leon. My mother. Sitting across from each other in what looked like a quiet restaurant, the kind with low lighting and corner tables chosen specifically because they were hard to see into from outside. Heads bent close. The posture of two people in the middle of something private.Fourteen months ago.I looked up at him slowly.He was watching me. He had been watching me since I picked up the phone and his expression had shifted into something I couldn’t read properly, something careful and braced, like he had been waiting for this moment and now that it was here he wasn’t sure he was ready for it.I turned the phone around and held the screen up so he could see it.“Explain this,” I said.He