All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET NIGHT : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

31 Chapters

Chapter 21: The move

KARA𓆩♡𓆪I heard about the twins on a Tuesday.Not from Alex, Alex had not called me since Sunday and I had stopped performing a surprise about that to myself even if I maintained it for everyone else. From the staff member I had been cultivating for eight months with the patient, unhurried attention of someone who understood that information required investment and investment required time.She sent me a message at half past eleven in the morning.Two words.“It’s twins.”I read it once. Set my phone face down on the desk. Picked it up and read it again.Twins?I had been managing a single pregnancy in my head for the past week and a half, filing it in the category of inconveniences that required strategy rather than panic, the category of things that could be handled with the right combination of patience and pressure and the specific advantage I had over Rose Jones that no pregnancy could remove. History. Familiarity. The years of knowing Alex that she could never catch up to re

Chapter 22: Regret

DEMIAN𓆩♡𓆪I woke up like I used to, nothing really special and dramatic. Then I saw it on a Tuesday morning in the kitchen. I wasn’t looking for it. I was sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop open and my coffee going cold beside it, scrolling through the kind of mindless morning feed that exists purely to fill the space before a day properly begins. And then it was just there, a blurred photograph, a headline, the specific combination of a name and a location that stopped my hand on the trackpad and made everything else on the screen irrelevant.Rose Jones. The Christopher estate. Pregnant.I stared at it.The photograph was taken from a distance and at an angle that suggested whoever took it hadn’t wanted to be seen taking it. It showed a figure coming through a set of gates, tall dark gates that I had seen in photographs of the Christopher property before, the kind that communicated money without needing to say anything. The figure was small. The bag she was carrying was th

Chapter 23: Something is not right

ROSE𓆩♡𓆪Something was wrong in the house and I could feel it before I could name it.It started on a Wednesday. Small things, the kind that individually meant nothing and collectively meant something I couldn’t quite assemble into a complete picture yet. A door in the east corridor that was always open when I passed it in the morning closed before I reached it. A conversation between two staff members that stopped a beat too quickly when I rounded the corner near the kitchen. Mrs. Baako, who was warm and consistent and whose warmth I had come to rely on as a fixed point in an otherwise variable environment, looked at me on Thursday morning with an expression I couldn’t read that was different from her usual expression in a way I couldn’t articulate.I paid attention.Paying attention was something I was good at, I had been good at since long before any of this, since the house with my uncle where reading the temperature of a room before you walked fully into it was a practical sk

Chapter 24: The file

ALEX𓆩♡𓆪Park’s file arrived on a Friday.It arrived in a sealed envelope. And delivered by someone from his office rather than sent electronically, which told me before I opened it that the contents were the kind he preferred not to have traveling through servers. I closed my study door and sat at my desk and opened it and began to read.“Rose Jones. Twenty-four years old. Born in the city, both parents deceased, by a car accident, she was seven years old. Taken in by her mother’s brother.” The uncle. A man Park’s report described in the specific neutral language of someone being factual about something that wasn’t neutral, strict household, limited warmth, Rose’s presence treated as an obligation rather than a choice.I kept reading.School records. Employment records. The hospitality company where she had worked for two years, good performance reviews, no disciplinary record, the kind of employee file that described someone who showed up and did the work without requiring manage

Chapter 25: Different

ALEX𓆩♡𓆪I carried it through the weekend like something I didn’t know where to put.Not the file, I had returned the file to the envelope and locked it in the desk drawer and that part was done. What I carried was what the file had left behind, the specific weight of information that changes the shape of a thing you thought you already understood. I had thought I understood the situation with Rose Jones. The pregnancy, the inheritance, the strategic compliance I had constructed. I had thought I had mapped it accurately.Park’s file had shown me how much of the map I had drawn from the wrong angle.I went through the weekend doing the things the weekend required, calls that couldn’t wait, a document that needed review, a dinner with my grandfather on Saturday that I got through with the particular performance of normalcy that large family dinners required. Don Christopher watched me across the table with the eyes of a man who noticed everything and said nothing about most of it, wh

Chapter 26: Reclaim strategy

KARA𓆩♡𓆪I thought about the beginning.Not the dramatic beginning, not the day I found out about Rose or the day I walked into that house and saw her in the corridor. The real beginning. Alex and I in the early days, before any of this existed as a possibility, when the landscape between us was simple and familiar and mine to move through without having to think about it.I thought about the way he used to look at me across a room, the way he takes me on random dates, buys me gold, diamonds. The way he pays attention to the things that matters to me. The specific quality of his attention focused, certain, arriving on me without appearing to search for me first because I was simply always where he expected me to be. I had built that. Cultivated it over years with the patience and precision of someone who understood that a man like Alex Christopher did not give his attention easily and that keeping it required constant and invisible maintenance.I had been good at the maintenance.I h

Chapter 27: The hot tea

ROSE𓆩♡𓆪Alex was different, he has become different of late. Not dramatically different, not in a way that announced itself or required acknowledgment or could be pointed to and named cleanly. Just different in the accumulation of small things that I had been cataloguing with the same careful attention I applied to everything in this house.The glass of water that appeared on the kitchen counter before I got there. Not every morning, just some mornings, the ones when I came down slightly later than usual, as though someone had noted my pattern and adjusted for it without being asked.The door to the garden held open on Tuesday when his hands were full and mine were too and the holding required him to pause in the middle of something he was doing.The way he stood in the corridor outside my room on Wednesday evening, I had heard the footsteps stop and the particular quality of the silence that followed, the silence of someone who had paused rather than passed, and then after a mo

Chapter 28: The long time bond

ALEX𓆩♡𓆪I knew what Kara had done, it didn’t look accidental to me. I knew it the moment it happened, the specific angle of her reach, the placement of the cup, the timing. I had known Kara for a long time and I knew the difference between her accidents and her intentions and that had not been an accident, it looked intentional. I know Kara too well to know she was a mean person. I looked at my phone.I kept looking at my phone.I told myself I was in the middle of something and that intervening in a moment that was already over would produce more tension than it resolved and that Rose had handled it without requiring my involvement and that was evidence she didn’t need my involvement.All of that was true.None of it was why I said nothing.I said nothing because saying something required me to take a position in front of Kara and in front of Rose and in front of whatever this situation had become, and taking that position out loud and at a breakfast table at eight in the mornin

Chapter 29: Restless thoughts

ROSE𓆩♡𓆪I told myself it didn’t matter.I said it out loud, quietly, to the closed door of my room, standing with my back against it and my hands flat against the wood behind me and the image of the two of them still sitting somewhere behind my eyes where I couldn’t quite reach to remove it.It doesn’t matter, she was here before me. Just like she will be here after I leave. I was here because of the babies. That was the full and complete reason for my presence in this house and in this life and in any proximity to Alex Christopher. The babies. Two heartbeats on a screen that I had pressed my hand over and made quiet promises to. Two lives that were mine regardless of what their father did in his study in the afternoon with women from his past, or is she still a past considering that I just saw them kiss and almost had sex. I was not here because of anything else.I was not here for any reason that gave me standing to feel what I was currently feeling and therefore what I was cur

Chapter 30: surgical

KARA𓆩♡𓆪I knew before the message arrived.That was the thing about knowing someone the way I knew Alex, you stopped needing confirmation. You felt the shift before anyone named it. Three years of learning the specific language of his silences, his posture, the fraction of a degree his attention moved when something had gotten through to him. I had built my entire understanding of him on exactly that kind of reading.And for the past week I had been reading his attention pointed in one direction.Away from me.I sat at my kitchen counter Thursday morning with my coffee going cold in front of me and thought about the doorway.Not the kiss, I had gone into the kiss knowing its limitations, knowing it was a move rather than a moment. The doorway. The specific quality of what Rose left behind when she turned and walked out of it. I had been watching people leave rooms for years and I understood the difference between someone leaving because they were hurt and someone leaving because t

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