All Chapters of THE COST OF SAVING HIM : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Kane's POV The underground level of the house was exactly as he'd left it. Nobody came down here without permission and nobody had been given permission recently, which meant the room was undisturbed and quiet in the way that had nothing peaceful about it — the quiet of a space that existed specifically for things that didn't happen anywhere else. Kane stood in the middle of it and looked at the wall. Maps. Contacts. Networks. Everything that had never touched his father's name because it had never needed to, because this part of what Kane was and what Kane did had always existed in a separate layer from the company and the business and the family structure that had just been dismantled floor by floor this morning. This was still his. All of it. He stood there and breathed and let that settle, let the fury that had been running hot since the biometric pad flashed red find something solid to press against instead of just burning through everything in its path. His phone

Nadia's POVI went upstairs because Lev told me to.Not because I wanted to, but because the way he said it left no room for anything else, and I'd learned enough about this house to know when pushing back was pointless. I'd heard enough from the top of those stairs anyway — not the words, not the specifics, but the temperature of it, the weight in Kane's voice, the kind of silence that sat between two people when something serious had already been decided.Something had happened at the office.I went to my room, picked up my book, sat against the headboard and opened it to a page I'd already read three times and stared at it without absorbing a single word. My mind kept going back to the stairs, to the quality of the quiet coming from below, to the specific feeling of a house that was holding its breath.I turned a page I hadn't read.I didn't hear him come in.That was the thing that stayed with me afterward — I didn't hear the door, didn't hear footsteps, didn't register anything u

Kane's POVShe knocked - quietly. He hadn't expected that. He'd told Lev to call her, not escort her, which meant she'd come on her own, which meant she'd chosen to come, and she'd still knocked, which told him something about where her head was."Come in," he said.The door opened and she stepped inside and Kane looked at her the way he looked at things he was trying to understand — starting from the bottom and working up, taking inventory without rushing it. The loose shirt, the bare feet, her hair down and slightly disheveled from sleep, the way she held herself in the doorway with one hand still on the handle like she was keeping the option of leaving available. Her eyes when they finally found his were doing something careful, something that was working very hard at being ordinary.She was failing at ordinary.He noticed.He also noticed the mark on her lip, faint now but there, and he looked at it for exactly one second before looking away."Sit down," he said.She came in and

Nadia's POVFour days.That was how long Kane had gone without saying a single word to me directly. Not good morning, not instructions passed through Lev, not even the brief acknowledgment of existing in the same room. Just — nothing. Four days of him moving through the house like I was furniture he'd stopped noticing, and me doing the same in the opposite direction because I had my pride and I intended to keep it.So when Lev knocked on my door yesterday evening and said Kane had a gala tonight and I was going with him, I'd stared at him for long enough that he'd repeated it.I was still processing it."Hold still," the maid said, adjusting something at my waist with the focused concentration of someone who took their work seriously and had no patience for fidgeting.I held still.The dress was deep green, fitted through the bodice and flaring slightly below, the kind of dress that had clearly been selected by someone who knew what they were doing and had opinions about it. I hadn't

Kane's POVThe meeting ran longer than he'd intended.By the time he came back to the room it was past two in the morning and the hotel corridor was completely silent and he opened the door quietly and stepped inside.She was asleep.Deeply, properly asleep, the kind that had nothing anxious in it, her hair spread across the pillow and one hand loosely curled beside her face. The robe had stayed on. The covers were pulled up to her shoulder. She looked unbothered by everything the day had been, which was something he stood and looked at for a moment.Her phone was on the pillow beside her, screen still faintly lit. He crossed the room carefully and looked at it before turning it off — a photograph, two girls in a kitchen, laughing at something off camera. Nadia on the left, her head thrown back, her eyes completely closed because she was laughing too hard to keep them open. The kind of photograph that existed because someone had caught a moment rather than arranged one.He looked at i