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BEG FOR ME, BILLIONAIRE のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

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Chapter Eleven: Are You My Dad?

I lay awake until past two thinking about a question I couldn't answer.Not the question Vale asked me. The half second before I answered it. That gap between are you sure and yes where I should have been certain and wasn't.I didn't know what to do with a man who listened that carefully to the space between my words.So Saturday morning I did what I always did when my head got too loud for the inside of my house.I got Eli up early. Told him we were going to the market.He was dressed in four minutes. That was a record.He had a system. Ankylosaur in his jacket pocket. Two pounds gripped in his fist. A very specific mission involving the woman with the small fruit tarts at the far end of the market and absolutely no detours. He narrated the full plan to me on the walk there like I hadn't done this exact Saturday with him for three years.I let him talk.His voice was the steadiest thing in my life and I needed it that morning more than usual.I saw Cyrus the moment we turned onto the

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Chapter Twelve: The Man Vale North Is

I kept seeing it. Rhys ending that call at the market. Turning. Looking directly at me across the stalls and the honey jars and the accordion music with an expression that had nothing to do with Eli and Cyrus on the cobblestones. That look stayed with me all Saturday. All Sunday I moved through the cottage doing ordinary things — Eli's bath, his dinner, three rounds of the dinosaur naming game he never got tired of — and underneath all of it that look was still sitting there. Rhys was not a careless man. Everything he did was deliberate. If that call made him look at me then the call had something to do with me. Sunday night I lay in the dark listening to Eli breathe through the baby monitor I still kept on my nightstand and I could not put it down. Monday morning I dropped him at school. Watched him run through the gate. Fenne caught my eye from the doorway and nodded once. I walked home. Opened the workroom. Picked up a hem. My phone rang at half past nine. "It's Vale," he s

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Chapter Thirteen: What She Built

The line stayed quiet after I said it.Eli gets out of school in two hours and I don't know if whoever made that call knows that.Then Vale's voice. Careful in the way he was careful when something required it."Call Talia. She does the school run. You stay in the workroom." A pause. "Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone you don't recognise. I'm leaving now."He hung up.I called Talia before my hand had moved.She picked up on the first ring."Someone came to Vale's practice this morning," I said. "Asking about Cyrus. His movements. Whether he comes alone. It wasn't Rhys."One second. That was all she needed."I've got Eli," she said. "Lock your door."Gone.I locked the door.Then I stood in the middle of my workroom.My second hand sewing machine. My folding table with the two brackets I put in myself. The handwritten sign in the window I wrote on a Tuesday morning six years ago while Eli slept in the carry cot in the corner because I couldn't afford childcare and couldn't affor

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Chapter Fourteen: Orin Counts His Losses

Forty three seconds.That was how long the call to the woman in Maplewood Hollow had lasted.Orin Vane set his phone on the cabinet and poured himself a drink and thought about forty three seconds. About a woman standing in a small workroom two hundred miles north with a dead phone in her hand and a sentence in her head that she was going to be turning over for the rest of the evening.Your boy is worth something to the people trying to make sure Cyrus doesn't survive.Good.Let her turn it over.He walked to the window. Ironveil City below him — glass and grey and cold ambition. His brother's name was on three floors of that skyline. Bought into two more. The Wray name stamped into the city like something permanent, something that would still be there when Cyrus was gone.When.That word had been living in Orin's chest for fifteen years like a door he kept finding locked.He sat down in his father's chair. The one by the fireplace that his father had used every evening for thirty yea

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Chapter Fifteen: Eli's Drawings

I didn't know two things were already in motion.I knew about the phone call. I knew about the stranger at Vale's practice. What I didn't know — what nobody in Maplewood Hollow knew yet — was that two hundred miles south a man I had never met had spent an evening deciding exactly what my son was worth and had already set two people moving because of it.I made Eli's breakfast like it was an ordinary Monday because for him it had to be.Fenne Halee had taught kindergarten in Maplewood Hollow for four years. Auburn hair always slightly escaping its clip. Soft green eyes that stopped being soft the moment something concerned her. She knew every child's face in her classroom the way you know the faces of people you love without ever deciding to.Monday morning was drawing time.Eli sat down with his crayons and went quiet the way he went quiet when something mattered to him. Careful crooked letters under each figure, the way five year olds write before the letters quite belong to them.Mu

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Chapter Sixteen: She Laughed Once

I was still looking toward the stairs when headlights swept across the kitchen window.Cyrus didn't knock straight away. He stood at the door and waited until I opened it, which was somehow worse than knocking — the patience of a man who understood he had no right to walk into this house uninvited anymore.We sat at the kitchen table. The same one. His hands folded the same way they had been the first time he sat there.He told me about Orin.Not everything. I could tell that much from how carefully he chose each sentence, like a man testing ice before trusting his weight to it. His brother had known about Eli for four days. Orin did not accept outcomes that failed to serve him and never had. Rhys was already making arrangements — people on the street, people near the school, things I would not see and was not meant to see."Eli will not be unprotected," he said. "Not for one hour. I need you to know that."I thought about what that actually meant. Strange men watching my son's school

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Chapter Seventeen: Platinum and Poison

He didn't tell me about Orin's call.I found out from Rhys on Thursday morning. He came to the workroom before I opened and stood in the doorway with the careful look of a man who had been instructed not to say something and had decided that the instruction was wrong.He told me about the call. What Orin said. The if you come home.I listened without speaking.Then I picked up my scissors and went back to the hem I had been pinning and Rhys left without being thanked because I was using everything I had to keep my hands steady and I had nothing left for courtesy.Cyrus had sat at my kitchen table the same night that call happened. He had told me about Orin. About the arrangements. About Eli being protected. He had looked at me across the table with that stripped back honesty he had been building slowly over weeks and he had left out the part where his brother had called him directly and told him to come home.I was still holding that when Tuesday morning arrived.Talia texted at nine.

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Chapter Eighteen: What Talia Does With Fury

She went to Cyrus.I stood at the sink with my hands still wet and read those three words and thought about what the evening had actually looked like as a sequence of events.Sola arriving at my door. Her hand on my frame. The sentence she delivered like someone doing me a favour. Walking away down my garden path with the ease of a woman who had finished something.And then going directly to the house four streets away where the man who had chosen her over me for years of my marriage was quietly trying to become someone different.She wanted him to know she had been here.She wanted to stand in the middle of whatever was beginning to shift in this town and make sure it stopped shifting.I dried my hands. Called Talia."Come over," I said. "I need to tell you everything."She was at my door in eight minutes.I told her all of it. The phone call to the workroom. The specific flat quality of the man's voice when he used Eli's name like it was a piece of information he'd had for a while.

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Chapter Nineteen: Mira Flint Does Not Do Soft

"I need to call Fenne," I said.Talia moved to the far end of the counter without a word.Fenne answered on the second ring."A woman was outside this morning," I said. "Platinum hair. Pale coat. Standing at the end of your street looking at the school before you arrived."A pause. "I didn't see her.""She was gone before you came out." The same voice I used for Eli when I needed him not to feel what I was feeling. "If she comes near the gate. If she approaches any of the children. If she slows down on that street at pickup time—""I call you first," Fenne said. "Nothing else. I call you.""Yes."Her voice went careful. "Ivy. Is Eli safe right now?"I looked at the clock on the bakery wall. One twenty. School out at three fifteen."He's safe right now," I said. "Keep it that way."I hung up.Talia put a piece of cake on the counter in front of me without saying anything about it.I didn't eat it. But knowing it was there was something. Some things you need to know are available even w

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Chapter Twenty: The Night He Came Looking

He replied in four minutes."Thank you. Ten o'clock."I sat with the phone in my hand and the kitchen quiet around me and thought about what I had just agreed to. Not the visit itself. What it meant that I had agreed without hesitation. That the yes had come before I had consciously decided to say it.I put the phone down. Made Eli's dinner. Did not think about it any further because thinking about it further was not something I could afford on a Thursday evening with a five year old asking about the relative merits of broccoli versus carrots with great seriousness.Saturday morning Eli wanted the tarts.He had been raising the subject since Thursday with the patient persistence of a child who understood that repetition was a legitimate negotiation strategy. He mentioned it at breakfast. He mentioned it to the ankylosaur at breakfast. He mentioned it on the walk there twice."I know," I said. "We're going.""The sugar ones specifically.""I know, Eli.""Not the jam ones. The sugar one

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