Novels by Favour Kayla

Chapter 20Nickie's POVI woke up the next morning and the first thing I did was panic.Not about Leon. Not about the kiss or what came after or the way he had looked at me when I finally stopped pretending. That part felt surprisingly solid for something that had happened less than twelve hours ago.I panicked because my dad was getting discharged in three days.And my dad was going to come home.To where.I sat up in bed and looked at the two mugs on my bedside table and thought about this for the first time with complete clarity. When my dad left the hospital he was going to need somewhere to recover. His apartment, the one I had been paying for while he was in the hospital with the last scraps of my savings, was a fourth floor walkup with no elevator and a bathroom that required navigating two steps to get into the shower.That was not going to work for a man recovering from a cardiac procedure.I needed a plan.I got up and went to the kitchen and Leon was already there which was

Leon's POVMy father called at four.I let it ring.He called again at four fifteen. I watched the screen until it stopped and then I put the phone face down on my desk and looked at the city through the window and thought about a man I hadn't spoken to in three years calling twice in twenty minutes because his plan had just collapsed in a boardroom and he needed to manage the damage.He called a third time at four thirty.I picked up.Silence on both ends for a moment. The particular silence of two people who have a great deal to say and no language built between them to say it in."Leon." His voice was older than I remembered. That was the first thing."Richard," I said. I hadn't called him dad in fifteen years. He had stopped deserving the word around the time he packed a bag on a Tuesday and left two boys in a house with a woman who responded to abandonment by gripping everything harder."I want to explain—""I don't need an explanation," I said. "I need you to instruct your lawye

Nickie's POVCole Knight looked like Leon the way a copy looks like an original.Same height, same dark hair, same way of holding himself that said he had grown up being told he was important. But where Leon's stillness was something he had built, something earned and deliberate, Cole's was performance. I could see it immediately. The slight tension around his jaw. The way his eyes moved just a fraction too fast.He was nervous.Good.Leon walked toward him and I stayed one step behind and slightly to the side, close enough to be present, far enough to watch Cole's face without him realizing I was reading it."Cole," Leon said. No warmth. No hostility. Just his name."Leon." Cole's voice was smooth. He had clearly practiced this. "You look well.""You're here as a proxy observer," Leon said. "Nothing more. You have no speaking rights and no voting rights in today's session."Cole smiled. It was a good smile. Practiced and easy. "I'm aware of the terms."His eyes moved to me again and

Leon's POVI didn't sleep.Not because of Cole or the email or the board or any of the things that should have been keeping me up. Those I could work with. Those had solutions and timelines and steps I could take in a specific order.I didn't sleep because of fifteen seconds in a hallway and a woman straightening my collar like it was something she had always done.I got up at five and went to my office and pulled everything I had on Cole Knight.His full name was Coleman James Knight. Twenty nine years old. His mother was my father's second wife, a woman named Patricia who had been twenty four when she married a fifty year old man and had lasted seven years before the money ran out and the lawyers came in. Cole had grown up between London and New York, educated at the kind of schools my father bought his way into, and had spent the last four years working in private equity under a firm that I now noticed was partially funded by my father's holding company.I had known Cole existed. I

Nickie's POVI stared at the screen for a long time.Daniel Kwon.I had not spoken to Daniel in three years. Not since the day he told me he had sold the research and I had stood in the doorway of our lab and looked at him and felt something close so completely behind my eyes that I hadn't cried. I had just left. Walked out. Never went back.I had spent three years being angry at him in the quiet background way that you're angry at something you can't change. Not hot anger. The settled kind that just lives in you.And now he was telling me he had been the one sending the texts.I got up and went down the hall and knocked on Leon's door.He opened it in thirty seconds which told me he hadn't been asleep either. He was still in his shirt, no jacket, no tie, and he looked at my face and stepped back to let me in without asking any questions.I handed him the phone.He read it. Read it again.Then he handed it back and said "call him.""Now.""Now."I called.Daniel picked up on the first

Leon's POVWalsh read the email twice.I watched him do it. The first time fast, the way you read something that surprises you. The second time slow, the way you read something you're trying to find a hole in.Then he looked up at me and I held his gaze and said nothing because I had learned a long time ago that the person who speaks first in a silence like this one loses it.Walsh looked at Nickie.She was standing beside me with her hand in mine and her face completely composed and I knew what it was costing her because I had watched her hold herself together in a hospital room at two in the morning and I knew exactly what her composed face looked like from the inside out."This came from the same person who sent the first text," Walsh said. Not a question."I believe so," I said."And your position on its contents.""My position is that my lawyer has documentation that tells a different story and you'll have it before nine tomorrow morning." I looked at him steadily. "I'm asking fo