Lahat ng Kabanata ng SECOND CHOICE, FIRST REGRET: The Billionaires Private Regret: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

The first time Aria Bennett saw Sebastian Drake again, she didn’t recognize him immediately, not because he had changed in any obvious way that would make him unfamiliar, but because she had spent so much time forcing herself not to look back, not to think about him, not to let her mind go anywhere near the part of her life that had once revolved around him, so when it finally happened and her eyes landed on him without warning, it didn’t feel like something she chose or something she was prepared for, it felt like something that just happened before she could stop it, before she could control it, before she could remind herself that she had already moved on from everything that had to do with him. She felt it before she even fully understood what she was looking at, that strange tight feeling in her chest that didn’t match the calm way she had been moving through the room all night, and for a second everything around her felt slightly off, like the sound of the music dropped just en

Aria stood there for a second longer than she should have, her phone still in her hand and the message still open on the screen, because even though the words were simple and not even that long, they carried a weight that made everything else around her feel like it had slowed down without warning, and the fact that his name was right there under it made it impossible to pretend that this was just a coincidence or something she could ignore and move past like everything else she had learned to leave behind. She should not have opened it, she knew that much immediately, because the moment she read it, the distance she had just created between them inside that room felt like it meant nothing, like all the effort she had put into keeping things controlled and simple had been undone in a second, and even though she had already walked away from him physically, something about that message pulled her right back into the same space mentally in a way she was not prepared for. For a brief mom

Aria did not sleep properly that night, not because she did not try, but because every time she closed her eyes, her mind kept circling back to the same thing; the call, his voice, the way he said he would see her again like it was already decided, and no matter how much she tried to push it aside and focus on something else, it stayed there in a way that made it impossible to completely ignore, because the truth was that this was no longer something she could walk away from as easily as she had wanted to believe. She woke up earlier than usual, not because she needed to, but because staying in bed felt pointless when her mind was already fully awake, and for a few seconds she just lay there staring at the ceiling, letting the reality of the situation settle in again, because the meeting he mentioned was not something she could avoid without raising questions, and avoiding it entirely would only create more problems than it solved, which meant she had no real choice but to go and fac

Aria did not move for a few seconds after reading the message, not because she did not understand it, but because the way it was written, simple and direct without any explanation, carried a kind of certainty that made it harder to process than it should have been, and even though part of her wanted to immediately dismiss it as nothing more than an assumption or a guess, the problem was that everything about him so far had shown that he did not say things without knowing exactly what he meant. Her fingers tightened slightly around her phone as she read it again, slower this time, as if looking at it differently would change what it said, but it didn’t, the words stayed the same, clear and certain, and the more she looked at them, the more she realized that this was not something she could brush off or ignore the way she had done with everything else, because this crossed a line she had not expected him to reach this quickly. She forced herself to breathe steadily, keeping her expres

Aria didn’t look back immediately after she pulled into the road, not because she didn’t want to, but because she knew doing that too soon would slow her down or throw her off focus, and right now she needed to keep moving forward without second guessing anything, her hands steady on the wheel, her foot pressing down just enough to keep the car moving fast without losing control, and even though everything in her told her to check if they were still behind her, she held it for a few seconds longer. “Don’t look yet,” Sebastian said through the phone, like he already knew exactly what she was about to do, and that alone made her focus tighten even more, because it meant he was tracking this just as closely as she was, maybe even more. “I’m not,” she replied, her voice even, controlled, like nothing had shifted, even though everything had. “Good,” he said, and there was no space between that and his next words, “take the next right, not the main one, the smaller street just before