All Chapters of The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate): Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

LEON’S POVI said the name and watched Kate’s face change.Not dramatically. Not the way faces change in films when revelations land, all wide eyes and sharp intake of breath. It was quieter than that. A stillness that moved through her expression like something settling into place, rearranging everything around it without making noise.She understood immediately.That was the thing about Kate. She didn’t need things explained twice. She took information and held it up against everything she already knew and found where it fit without being walked through it step by step.I ended the call with Bryan and stood in the corridor for a moment.Bryan had been confused when I called. Genuinely confused, not the performance of confusion, I knew the difference with him after eleven years. He hadn’t known what I was talking about when I asked about the messages. Hadn’t known about the information that had reached Natalie. Hadn’t known his phone had been the bridge between our circle and hers.H

LEON’S POVI sat with the engine running and looked at the car in the driveway.A black Mercedes. S-Class. The same model my father had been driving for the past three years, changed annually, always the same colour, always the same model, because Carter Romano was a creature of habit in the small things even when the large things were chaos.The plates confirmed it.My father was inside that house.I turned the engine off slowly.Beside me Kate was very still, waiting, giving me the space to process without filling it with words. She had gotten good at that. Better than most people I had known far longer.“How did he find her?” she asked after a moment. Quiet. Not pushing.“The same way I found her,” I said. “Resources and patience.”“He knew about Luciana?”“He must have.” I thought about what Jared had told Kate at the bar. Carter had shown up at Jared’s house with enough information to confirm the switch. Which meant Carter hadn’t just stumbled onto a document, he had been looking

LEON’S POVWe left Luciana with her sister.Not because it was the safest option necessarily but because it was the option Luciana had chosen and she had earned the right to make that particular choice. I left my private contact posted at the end of the street with instructions to call me directly if anything changed and to let nothing through that he couldn’t account for.Justin came with us.That hadn’t been planned but it hadn’t been a surprise either. He had stood in that sitting room after everything settled and looked at me with Carter’s eyes and said quietly that he wasn’t going back to wherever he had come from until he understood the full shape of what he had walked into.I couldn’t argue with that.Carter drove separately. We had spoken briefly in the hallway before leaving, just the two of us, while Kate sat with Justin in the sitting room and Luciana’s sister made tea that nobody drank.My father had looked at me in the hallway with an expression I hadn’t seen on him befor

LEON’S POVI pulled up the news on my phone.It loaded in the particular way that breaking stories loaded, slightly slower than usual, like the servers were straining under the weight of everyone trying to reach the same thing at the same time.The headline was the first thing.Then the image beneath it.I looked at it for a moment without speaking. Then I crossed to the television on the far wall of the sitting room and switched it on, finding the news channel without having to search for it because it was already the first thing that came up.The screen filled with a press conference.Live.Natalie Smith was standing at a podium.She was dressed carefully, the kind of careful that had been thought through, dark and composed, the visual language of someone presenting themselves as a victim rather than an aggressor. Her auburn hair was pulled back. Her expression was controlled and serious and designed for exactly this moment.Behind her stood two people I recognised as her family’s l

LEON’S POVJared Adams was standing in my entrance hall.Not invited. Not expected. Just there, with his jacket slightly creased and his eyes doing that thing they did when he had been drinking enough to feel brave but not enough to be stupid. Fiona stood a few feet away from him, which told me the two of them had not arrived together by choice.Carter was near the door.He looked at me when I came in and gave a small tight shake of his head that meant he hadn’t known Jared was coming either.“How did you get past the gate?” I asked.Jared smiled. The particular smile of a man who thought charm could patch over anything. “Your security recognised me from the wedding.”I made a mental note to deal with that later.“Leon.” Carter’s voice was low. “We need to talk. All of us. It’s time.”I looked at Fiona.She was watching me with that steady expression she had, the one that gave nothing away from a distance but said quite a lot if you knew where to look. She looked tired. Not the tiredn