All Chapters of The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate): Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

41 Chapters

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE : In The Dark

LEON’S POVI saw it the same moment she did.A figure. Standing just beyond the reach of the garden lights, still and deliberate, positioned exactly where the shadows were thickest between two trees at the far edge of the grounds.Not moving. Just standing there.Watching.I stepped closer to the window without thinking, close enough that Kate’s shoulder was almost against my chest. She hadn’t moved either. I could feel the tension in her, the slight change in her breathing, the way her arms had tightened across herself.I kept my voice low. “Step back from the window.”She didn’t argue this time. She moved back slowly and I moved with her, keeping my eyes on the figure outside until the angle of the glass cut off the view.I crossed to the door and pulled it open.“Sade.”She appeared from the kitchen corridor almost immediately, which told me she had been close enough to hear that something had shifted in the house.“Call the gate,” I said quietly. “Tell them we have an uncleared pr

Last Updated : 2026-05-19

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO : What Does That Make Us

KATE’S POVHe didn’t answer immediately.I hadn’t expected him to. Leon didn’t do anything immediately when it mattered. He sat with things, turned them over, decided how to handle them before he let anything out. I had learned that about him in the past few weeks more than I had in all the years of growing up next door to him.But this silence was different from his usual ones.This one had something uncertain in it.And Leon Romano being uncertain about something was such a foreign thing that I found myself watching him more carefully than I normally allowed myself to.“I don’t know,” he said finally.Three words. Quiet and plain and carrying more honesty than anything else he had said tonight.I looked down at my hands.The question had come out before I fully thought it through but now that it was out there I couldn’t pull it back and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Because it was the right question. It was the question that sat underneath everything else, underneath the records and th

Last Updated : 2026-05-21

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE : The Third Voice

LEON’S POVI knew the voice.It took me a second to place it, the way you place something you weren’t expecting to hear in a context that doesn’t fit. Like hearing a song from a specific year of your life suddenly playing in a room where it has no business being.Then it landed.Luciana.I looked at Kate. Her face had gone pale in the way that happens when something reaches deeper than shock. Not just surprise but something underneath surprise. The kind of pale that comes when the ground shifts and your body knows it before your mind does.I reached over and took the phone from her hand gently.“Luciana,” I said.A pause on the other end. Then, “I wondered how long before you figured it out.”Her voice was the same as I remembered. Quiet and unhurried. The voice of a woman who had spent decades in rooms where she wasn’t supposed to have opinions and had learned to carry everything internally instead.“Where are you?” I asked.“Somewhere safe,” she said. “For now.”“You left the estate

Last Updated : 2026-05-21

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR : Fault Lines

KATE’S POVI didn’t sleep.I had gone upstairs with every intention of trying, had changed out of my clothes and got into bed and closed my eyes and waited for my mind to cooperate. It didn’t. It just kept running, cycling through everything that had happened in the past few hours like it was looking for something it had missed the first time around.Luciana’s voice on the phone.The name she had given us.Leon’s face when he heard it.I had watched him carefully in that moment because Leon’s face was usually the least useful place to look for information. He had spent years perfecting the art of showing nothing, of keeping everything so far below the surface that you could stand right in front of him and have no idea what was actually happening underneath.But tonight had been different.Tonight I had seen things move through his expression that he hadn’t managed to catch in time. And when Luciana said that name I had seen something I didn’t have a word for yet. Not betrayal exactly.

Last Updated : 2026-05-22

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE : What Bryan Knew

LEON’S POVI read Allison’s message twice.Then I set Kate’s phone down on the counter and stood there for a moment with my hands flat against the surface, looking at nothing in particular while everything rearranged itself inside my head.He already knew the answers.Four words. Simple and plain and carrying enough weight to shift the entire foundation of what I thought I understood about the past few weeks.Bryan had gone to Allison. Had asked specific questions about Oliver. About what Oliver knew and how far back his digging went. And when Allison hadn’t given him anything he had revealed, whether intentionally or not, that he already had the information he was pretending to be looking for.Which meant the questions weren’t questions.They were confirmation.Bryan had been checking what Allison knew. Measuring how much had reached Kate through her. Working out the shape of what I knew and didn’t know by approaching the people closest to me instead of approaching me directly.I kne

Last Updated : 2026-05-22

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX : Missing

KATE’S POVI watched Leon’s face change.It was subtle, the way his expressions always were, but I had been paying enough attention over the past few weeks to catch it. The slight tightening around his eyes. The way his jaw set a fraction harder than usual. The stillness that came over him that was different from his controlled stillness, sharper, like something had just narrowed very quickly inside his head.He turned the phone toward me without saying anything.I read the message.Don’t go to Luciana. She isn’t at the hotel anymore.I looked up at him. “Who sent this?”“I don’t know.”“Same unknown number?”“Different one.”I read it again. Not a threat. Not a warning designed to frighten. Just a statement, flat and plain, like someone passing along information they thought we needed without wanting credit for it.Which meant whoever sent it wasn’t working against us.Or at least didn’t want us to think they were.“Call the hotel,” I said.Leon was already dialing. He put it to his

Last Updated : 2026-05-28

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN : The Bench

LEON’S POVI saw her at the same time Kate did.I had already registered Luciana, the small neat figure sitting with her bag at her feet and her hands folded in that particular way she had, patient and contained, like she had been sitting in difficult situations for so long that her body had simply stopped registering them as uncomfortable.But the woman beside her stopped everything.I put the car in park slowly.Beside me Kate had gone completely still. Not the kind of still that comes from calm. The kind that comes from your body making a decision to stop moving while your mind catches up with what your eyes are telling it.I understood that feeling.Because sitting beside Luciana on that bench, hands in her lap, eyes on our car, was Fiona Adams.Kate’s mother.I got out of the car.The morning air was cool and sharp. The street was quiet at this hour, a few people moving at the far end, a delivery van idling outside a building across the road. Normal. Ordinary. Completely indiffer

Last Updated : 2026-05-28

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT : Jared

KATE’S POVI stared at the name on the screen.Dad.The word looked strange. It had always looked strange in a way I had never examined too closely before because examining it meant asking questions I hadn’t been ready to ask. But standing here on this pavement with my biological mother sitting three feet away and a note in Leon’s pocket threatening the woman who had helped switch us at birth, the word looked stranger than it ever had.Jared Adams was not my father.I knew that now. Had known it since last night when Leon had said it plainly across the sitting room and the ground had disappeared from under me. But knowing something and feeling it were different processes and they didn’t always happen at the same speed.The phone kept ringing.Leon was watching me. Luciana was watching me. Fiona was watching me with that particular expression she had, the one I now understood differently than I ever had before.I answered it.“Kate.” His voice came through immediately, loud and slightl

Last Updated : 2026-05-29

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE : Carter

KATE’S POVI sat very still.The bar hummed quietly around us. The television in the corner flickered. Somewhere behind the counter a glass clinked against another glass and the sound felt too loud for the moment I was sitting inside.Carter Romano knew.I turned those three words over slowly, looking at them from every angle, trying to find the part that made sense.“How?” I asked.Jared wrapped both hands around his glass. He hadn’t drunk from it since I sat down, which told me whatever he was carrying was heavy enough to override even that particular habit.“He didn’t say exactly,” Jared said. “He just showed up at the house last night. Late. After ten.” He paused. “I hadn’t seen him in years. Not face to face like that.”“What did he say?”Jared exhaled slowly. “He said he knew about the night the children were born. Said he had found something, some document or record, I don’t know exactly what. He wasn’t specific.” He looked at me across the table. “But he knew enough. He knew F

Last Updated : 2026-05-29

CHAPTER THIRTY : Breaking News

LEON’S POVMy phone started ringing before we reached the safehouse.I had found the place two years ago, a quiet apartment on the east side of the city registered under a company name that couldn’t be traced back to me directly. I had never needed it for anything specific. Just one of those things you arranged when you lived the kind of life that occasionally required somewhere to put people who needed to not be found.Today it was earning its purpose.I had settled Luciana in the bedroom at the back, the one with no window facing the street, and left Fiona in the small sitting room with water and instructions not to open the door for anyone. She had accepted both without argument, which told me she understood the severity of what was happening better than she was letting on.I was in the narrow corridor between the two rooms when the first call came in.Bryan.I let it ring out.It rang again immediately.I declined it.Then a message came through. Not from Bryan. From the head of t

Last Updated : 2026-05-29

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