All Chapters of BEG FOR ME, BILLIONAIRE: Chapter 21 - Chapter 25

Talia sat down beside me without asking.She didn't say anything about what she had watched from three stalls away. Didn't ask about Alden or what he said or why I was sitting on a bench in the middle of a packed-down market like someone who had lost the thread of the afternoon.She handed me the rest of her coffee and waited.Eli climbed into her lap within thirty seconds. Second tart in hand. She didn't ask where he got it."You alright?" she said. To me. Quietly."I don't know yet," I said.She nodded. That was the right answer and she knew it.We walked home together and I spent the rest of Saturday with the information Alden had given me sitting in my chest like a stone I had picked up and couldn't put down.He came looking. One morning. Empty rooms. And then he left.Sunday I made Eli pancakes and fixed a hem and walked to the end of the garden and back twice for no reason I could explain. I did not call anyone. I did not decide anything.I just carried it.I didn't tell Cyrus I

"Don't go outside."I hadn't moved from the window.He arrived twenty minutes later with Rhys and two men I didn't recognise who spoke to each other quietly and positioned themselves along the street with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this many times before in many different cities. The journalists watched them arrive and photographed that too.Cyrus came inside.He stood in my kitchen with his coat still on and his phone in his hand and told me what he knew. The leak had come from inside Ironveil City. He had a name. Alden was already moving. Legal notices by noon.None of it undid the article. None of it removed the photograph from the internet or gave me back the morning I had spent inside eight paragraphs that called me calculating without once checking whether I was.I stood at the counter and listened to him.This was the thing I had not prepared for. Not the journalists or the article or even the photograph of me at the school gate. The thing I had not prepare

I stood in the hallway for longer than I planned.Eli was back at the kitchen table. The ankylosaur was in its place at the front of the formation. Everything was exactly as it had been before Maude arrived and nothing felt the same.I could not stand alone in the hallway with that half second on her face for the rest of the evening.I texted Talia. Coming over. She replied in four seconds. Door open."She came without calling," Talia said."Yes.""To your door. No warning. Just arrived.""Yes.""And you let her in.""Eli was at the table."Talia picked up her coffee. Set it down. Picked it up again without drinking it. Three movements that told me she was working through something she hadn't decided how to say yet."What did she say to him," she said.I told her. The stegosaurus. Maude crouching slowly to Eli's level. The question he asked about the grey eyes. The three words she gave back.Some of them.Talia was very still."Some of them," she repeated."Yes."She looked at her cup