All Chapters of The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate): Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

KATE’S POVNobody moved.Stefena Romano, the woman who had made an art form out of saying exactly as much as she intended and never a syllable more, was sitting in that chair looking at her husband like she had finally run out of road.Carter had gone very still.Not the polite stillness of a man waiting for someone to finish speaking. The kind that meant his body had made a unilateral decision to stop while his mind caught up.“Stefena,” he said. Just her name. Low and careful.“Let me finish,” she said.He sat back down slowly.She didn’t look at anyone else in the room. Not at Justin standing by the wall with his jaw tight. Not at me. Not at Fiona, who had gone very quiet in the way of someone who already knew what was coming and was bracing for the version of it spoken aloud.She kept her eyes on Carter.“I found out about Martha three years into your relationship with her,” she began. “Not the affair, I knew about that earlier. I mean I found out about the child.”Carter’s expres

KATE’S POVThe cursor was still blinking.Like the phone had been waiting. Like whoever left it here had expected someone to find it mid-sentence and just hadn’t known who.Leon read it over my shoulder. Neither of us spoke for a moment. The shipping yard was the kind of quiet that had noise underneath it, water somewhere close, metal settling, wind cutting between containers, but none of that registered properly. Just the cracked screen and those seven words and the cursor doing its small relentless thing.Leon, if you’re reading this, I—I stood up slowly.“He knew,” I said.Leon looked at me.“He knew something was going to happen before it happened.” I held up the phone slightly. “You don’t start a message addressed to someone specific unless you’ve already decided they’re the one who needs to find it. He wasn’t just typing. He was trying to leave something behind.”Leon took the phone from me carefully.He looked at it for a long moment without saying anything. I watched him thin

KATE’S POVThe silence after Carter’s voice was worse than the shout itself.Bryan moved first. Low along the dock, fast. Leon caught my arm before I could follow him.“Stay behind me.”“Leon—”“Please.” Just that. Not a command this time.I stayed half a step back. Close enough to see. Far enough that he could tell himself I was listening.We reached the gangway. Bryan crouched near the boat’s edge, signaling something with two fingers, then one. Leon understood it immediately. I didn’t, not until later, but I followed anyway.He went up first.The deck creaked. He froze. Waited. Nothing happened so he kept going, slower now, and I went with him, my heart somewhere up near my throat where it had been sitting most of the evening.Through the cabin window I saw Wakefield standing near a table, hands raised slightly, palms out. The posture of a man trying to look reasonable in a situation that had stopped being reasonable several minutes ago.Natalie stood beside him.And Carter was on

KATE’S POVThree days ago.I did the math without meaning to. Three days ago was before the dinner where she’d dropped that photograph of me and Oliver on the table. Before any of us knew Carter had found anything. Before the press conference, before Martha’s name made headlines, before any of it had cracked open in front of the cameras.Stefena had authorised a security firm before everything became public.Leon had gone completely still beside me, phone pressed to his ear, and I watched something move behind his eyes that I’d only seen once before. The night his composure had actually broken in that car, after the dinner, after the photograph.“Send me everything you have on that authorisation,” he said. His voice didn’t shake. It just went flat. “Every detail.”He hung up.For a second neither of us said anything. The marina had gone quiet again, just water against the dock and the distant hum of the city beyond it. Luciana’s sister was sitting on a bench a few feet away, wrapped i

KATE’S POVI stepped back from the phone.Not far. Just enough to put a breath of space between me and that screen and the words on it and the way Leon’s face had gone when I’d read them.He hadn’t denied it.That was the part I kept coming back to. He hadn’t said it immediately the way innocent people said things immediately, the automatic no that came before thought. He’d just stood there holding the phone and looking at me with an expression I didn’t have a name for yet.“Leon.”“Kate—”“Don’t manage this.” I said it quietly. No heat behind it. I was too tired for heat. “Whatever it is, just say it.”He set the phone face down on the table.That small action, phone face down, told me more than anything he’d said in the last ten minutes. It was what he did when he needed to remove something from the equation so he could think clearly. I’d watched him do it enough times to understand the language of it.He pulled out a chair and sat down.First time all night he’d sat down somewhere