Billionaire Romance19 min read
I Came Back for Blood — and Found a Home
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I wake to the smell of disinfectant and a small warm head against my ribs.
“Don’t move,” a low voice says. “Stay still.”
I keep my eyes shut. The voice is calm, colder than the winter light through the curtains, but it is steady. A child’s breath, small and wet, ghosts my cheek.
“Mallory,” the voice says softer now. “You’re awake.”
I let the name sit. It is new and it fits. I taste metal and pain and the old thinking that breaks like thin ice underfoot.
“Where am I?” I manage, my voice a dry paper.
“You’re safe,” Greyson Jung says. “For now.”
I laugh, half scream, half sob. “Safe? This is exactly the place I promised myself I would never be.”
He doesn’t argue. He only watches me with an expression that is nearly impossible to read.
“Can I see him?” I whisper.
A small hand presses fingers into my palm. “Mama,” the child says, and his voice is a bell. He looks up at me with an old, solemn face that is too wise for three years.
I don’t answer right away. I close my eyes and remember a warehouse floor slick with blood, the way my body burned with a pain that made the world dissolve, how everything I loved had been stolen. I remember the woman who had smiled as she put me there: Fallon Acevedo.
“You saved me,” I tell Marcus Maeda. “Once. I’ll not be saved again.”
“You don’t have to be,” Greyson says. He stands in the doorway, his coat catching the light, and for a second he is only a shape. Then he takes a step in and his shadow crosses the bed. “You did not ask for this life. But you don’t have to face them alone.”
I stare. I can’t tell if his words are a contract or a threat.
“Why help me?” I ask instead.
Greyson drops onto the chair, folding his long fingers together. “You saved my son.” He says it plain, no flourish. “You gave him back to me in a wine cellar. I do not forget.”
Memory comes back in punches. The wine cellar. The small boy in the dark. How my fingers had brushed his hair. How a stranger’s voice had said, “Report her. You have her blood.” A lie and a trap and a mark.
“You should be dead,” I say.
He snorts. “Not for me.” Then quieter: “Not while my son calls you ‘mama’.”
He is impossible. He is dangerous. He is very, very tall. And somewhere under the heat of it, a strange thread wires into me—annoyance at being controlled, gratitude I did not ask for, and a stubborn part of me that still wants revenge.
Three years ago they took everything. They killed my chance at a future, and during one long, slow year in a foreign clinic I rebuilt my hands. Harrison Bond and his people trained me until I could vanish in plain sight, until the thud of a heel on a rooftop sounded like applause. I became the perfect instrument.
I was supposed to turn the knife into proof, not a lover. I was supposed to hand over the evidence like a neat present. Instead the first time I stung the world, I hit a wall I hadn't expected—Greyson Jung.
“I won’t sign anything,” I say now, fingers tightening around the patch of his son’s blanket.
Greyson’s lips pull up, briefly. “You will not sign. You will answer a phone when I call.”
“You can order me around?” I try to sound indignant and fail.
He leans forward. “You can pretend you’re free. You’re not. Not yet.”
I test him: “If I agree to one favor, how many will you ask?”
Greyson’s laugh is tiny. “Depends on your life.”
I close my eyes and imagine Fallon Acevedo’s painted face when everything I know comes out. The woman had celebrated as she pushed me into a prison cell. She had whispered that I had stolen a man she’d loved. She had told me she loved him—how she loved him to the point she wanted me dead. Her cruelty was steady and personal.
“You’ll help me expose Fallon?” I ask.
Greyson’s jaw sets. “I will make sure she never walks into a boardroom as a free woman again. But listen: when I step into your fight, the world changes. You will not take back the past without paying a price today.”
We haggle like thieves. He wants me to move into his house until the dust settles. He wants me to be on call. I want a single thing—a paper that proves what I was framed for was false and returns to me what was ripped away: the right to my child’s memory, the footprint of my name in the world.
“You are asking me to be your kept woman,” I say finally.
Greyson smiles like a man who has been waiting for this joke. “I am asking you to survive.”
We make a deal. I sign nothing, but I accept his hand when he offers it. The boy squeezes my finger. Marcus tastes like citrus and trouble.
“You are reckless,” Greyson says as we ride to his estate in a car that hums like something alive. “And I like that.”
“Flatterer,” I say. It's not quite a lie.
*
They call Fallon Acevedo a social queen. She runs a media empire and more than one charity. She has flowers on her desk and men who betray their wives for her laugh. She believes in her right to own the room.
The plan is raw and simple. Harrison Bond has dug up a ledger that hints at a pattern: hush money, fake testimonies, forged signatures. Ye Xun—Fallon’s younger sister—has been the one playing the public face of the family while Fallon moved in the dark. Ye Xun is fragile and scared. She is, mercifully, not guilty of what Fallon did.
I will not trade Ye Xun for silence. I will trade evidence and the public stage for everything I need. The board of Ye Holdings will be tonight—Fallon’s hubris will be the lever.
“Tonight,” I tell Greyson in the car, “I will go in as a charity performer. I will let them see me. I will take the place Fallon thinks I will never take again.”
He watches me. “You can walk out without speaking.”
“Not this time.”
Greyson nods. “Then we set the stage.”
He does not hesitate. By the time we arrive at the gala, his presence alone clears a path. Everyone finds a thin, cold space in their chests when he walks in. I used to be so hungry for that power. Now I have it, and I am careful how I use it.
The party is gold and white and shallow as glass. I move through like a shadow, with a dress I refuse to feel ashamed in. Fallon is there, trailing perfume like a weapon. She smiles at me with sharp teeth.
“Mallory,” she says. “You’re back from the dead. How unexpectedly theatrical.”
I step close enough to her so she can feel my breath. “You told me once I belonged in a grave. Good thing I didn’t listen.”
She laughs and the sound is a blade. “You look… resilient.”
“You look exhausted,” I say. “Let’s be honest—your energy is on the last leg.”
She bristles. “Watch your—”
A waiter trips. Wine runs. A tiny chaos erupts, camera flashes like small explosions. In one measured motion I sweep off a small velvet box from a tray and drop it in front of Fallon—the thing she prized as proof of her social victory. It’s a token that showed someone owned the city.
“Is that mine?” she says.
“It once was yours,” I answer. “It’s also in a photo found on your assistant’s phone—the same phone our Harrison gave me.”
Her hand goes pale. Then she laughs too loud. “You have nothing.”
“How much do you want to bet?” I ask. The cameras love a hunting cat. They turn toward us, hungry. I am not patient.
“Everyone,” I say into the nearest microphone because the world has ears and tonight I make it listen, “do you remember the death of Mayor Li Chengfu? Do you remember who was found at his house the night he fell? Do you remember who told the story on the front page?”
Fallon’s eyes flash. A dozen bodies close in instinctively to protect her. She is a queen in training and she knows how to deflect light. But public rooms are thin like skin. A needle can go through.
Silhouettes whisper at the door. Someone is livestreaming.
“You lied,” I tell the room. “Fallon Acevedo lied to you for thirty years. She bought witnesses. She bribed a guard. She paid to hide CCTV. She replaced words on a document with hers. She told the court a story so pretty that none of you thought to check.”
“Lies,” Fallon says. “This is—what is this? Accusation without proof.”
I step forward. “Look.” Harrison Bond pulls out an old envelope. He hands it to Greyson. Greyson opens it and spreads a set of documents and a flash-drive. The drive has recordings. There are hospital notes with different dates. There are receipts tied to Fallon’s accounts. There are photos: Fallon at the mayor’s building at strange hours; Fallon’s signature on transfer documents; a napkin with a note about a ‘push’ scrawled on the back, in Fallon’s handwriting.
People move like a flock spooked. Fallon's assistant presses a trembling hand to her chest.
“You’re playing games,” Fallon hisses. She is doing her best to smile. “These are fabrications. You want a drama.”
I hold up my hand. “Why did you put me in a cell for seven years? Why did you decide to ruin a woman who had nothing? Why did you make sure I disappeared?”
“You’re insane,” Fallon says. Her voice grows small.
“In this photo,” I say, “your hand rests on the guard’s shoulder as he writes the report. In this audio, you explain the alibi. In this ledger, your payments to a man who later testified against me are clear. Your emails show you celebrated when the story ran.”
A murmur moves through the room like cold wind. Someone records, someone gasps, someone covers a mouth. Fallon’s face drains of color.
“You forgave yourself,” Greyson says, quietly, to the cameras. “You never forgave the truth.”
Fallon is not prepared for this. She has been the actor of consequence for so long she believes consequence is a lie. She glared at me and tried to smile. Now the smile cracks.
“You have no right,” she sputters. “You were guilty. You killed—”
“I didn’t,” I say. “You framed me because you were jealous. That man—Mayor Li—he was your father’s friend. You needed a reason to shift a board vote. You wanted the optics. So you manufactured a monster.”
A man in a navy suit who runs PR for the city stumbles forward. “Proof,” he says, voice collecting itself. “We need proof.”
Greyson pushes the flash-drive into the nearest laptop. The whole room hears Fallon’s voice on the recording, casual, cold: “Make it look accidental. Push him down in the stairwell. Make sure we can blame the wrong person. And if she gets in the way, let her take the fall.”
The room goes still. The chandeliers sound like distant rain.
Fallon’s face contorts from anger to panic. She bolts for the door. Men step in her path. She shrieks, a black bird. “You can’t—You can’t—”
“I can,” Harrison says. He is not smiling. “And the police are on their way.”
Fallon’s assistant collapses in a chair sobbing. She clawed at her hair; she is twenty-four and spent a decades-long plan on someone else’s lie.
“Call the cameras,” Fallon screams. “This is a setup. They want me ruined.”
The cameras keep rolling. People who once smiled from her hand are backing away, filming as they go. Someone uploads a live clip; it explodes in minutes.
She bolts into a conference room and locks the door. Security scrambles, but Greyson already sent two men he trusts to the parking lot. The police arrive—officials sent by a man who owns the city’s most private files. They have a warrant.
Fallon pounds on the conference-room window. She is a queen on a small island.
People gather in the hall when the door opens. The officers walk Fallon down the steps in cuffs. Her lipstick smudges her face like a child’s mark.
“Why—why are you doing this?” she screams at me as she is pushed through the corridor. Her voice is raw. “I loved him! You took what was mine!”
“You murdered a man’s reputation for a board seat,” I say. I feel cold and not much else. “You broke lives. You cut the thread that made a woman a mother. You should be ashamed.”
Her legs buckle when the camera light hits her. She drops into an office chair on the way and for a heartbeat she looks small. For the first time her empire seems like clay under a boy’s boot.
The press eats it live. Fallon's social feeds implode. Her charity announces an immediate internal audit; television anchors say her name like a bad chord. Messages from sponsors roll in—some pull out, some suspend donations. Her agents go silent. Her name trends like a bad storm.
Inside the boardroom the lawyers sift through the evidence like carrion birds. They find a dozen more pieces: a bank wire that leads to offshore accounts, payments to a prison guard that match the day I was framed, an admission text message to a distant cousin. The company stock plummets within hours. The board calls for an emergency session. Mitigation teams scramble to put out fires.
Fallon’s phone refuses to stop ringing. Her husband—yes, her husband, a soft man who thought marriage would cover all—stands stunned and then leaves. With each text she receives that starts with “Per legal counsel,” the color drains from her cheeks.
Outside, a crowd gathers and someone posts a clip of Fallon being led out in cuffs. People record her face as if it were a public spectacle. A flood of messages read: “How could she?” “I donated to her charity.” “My children watched her channel.” The scenes repeat.
Later that night, a firm removes her photos from its banner. A livestream host reads charges aloud; viewers type #Justice4Mallory until the tag is everywhere. She had built scaffolding to climb higher; she burned it all to beat someone she was jealous of.
The woman who once held my throat at a warehouse is reduced to a small, damp figure being shouted at by cameras. Her friends avoid her. The board that protected her convenes and votes to freeze her accounts until an internal investigation is complete. Within 24 hours, two major sponsors withdraw. Within 48 hours, her company’s stock drops by thirty percent. Board members resign. The stock exchange closes the company’s trading for review. The social press dissects every sentence she ever sent.
The end is not quiet. Fallon is escorted from the building by men with stern faces, her hair a mess, mascara streaked like war paint. A police van waits. A TV crew follows. Men and women who once signed her checks stand in the rain with umbrellas, phones out, watching.
A last bit of cruelty: the very guard she once paid gives a courtroom statement that he had been paid to file a false report. He kneels before a magistrate and admits his lie and tears flow in the room. People hold up phones, filming the confession. It goes viral.
Fallon’s mother appears in a video, elderly and trembling, saying she did not know the extent of her daughter’s actions. The public is ruthless. The message is clear: the powerful can fall. The fallen scream and beg. Fallon collapses to her knees on courthouse steps and wails. A woman in a red dress stands and films with a small smile. The internet is a hungry thing.
I feel nothing while they drag her. The hollow inside me is not satisfaction. It is registry. A room that used to be mine now pulses with new air. I think of the child I lost.
Greyson stands beside me. He takes my hand and squeezes it. “It’s not over,” he says. “But it’s a large, important beginning.”
I let his pressure anchor me.
*
Fallon’s downfall is only the first head of a hydra. Ye Holdings scrambles. Late-night lawyers call. A seaside villa is raided. A luxury watch is seized for evidence. A popular actor who owed favors to Fallon releases a statement of regret. The network that broadcast her shows suspends her programs. People who once kissed her hands now distance themselves like fire.
And then the board meeting. The cameras file in. The world watches the meeting live: a formal setting where Fallon is called to answer to fraud, bribery, and perjury. She walks in strapped and supported, still in handcuffs. The hall is packed with shareholders, journalists, and people she used to patronize. I sit near the aisle with Greyson and Marcus tucked in my lap.
Fallon stands before the board. Her face is brittle. Her voice is a thread. One shareholder calls out, “Ms. Acevedo, how could you?”
She stares at me for a while as if I were something she cannot comprehend. “You’re dead,” she whispers.
“I am not.” I say loud enough.
Then Harrison Bond stands and plays a string of messages between Fallon and a private operative. It is explicit: planning, payments, instructions to plant evidence. The chairman opens a file and reads each line like a sermon. Fallon's face collapses. People who once bowed now shuffle their chairs away.
“You have dragged your family into a pit,” the chairman says. “You have ruined a life and a company. On behalf of the shareholders, we vote to remove you from all positions, freeze your accounts, and refer your crimes to the prosecutor.”
Someone cries “Guilty!” The room is a volcano.
Fallon collapses into a chair. “No,” she says. “You don’t—” Then she looks at the cameras and bows her head. Her supporters—an influencer, a trustee, a man who once called her friend—all deny knowledge. Sponsors cut ties one by one on live television. The public record is destroyed just then, and Fallon’s image lives only to decay.
Outside the building, a crowd sings as if a storm has passed. People who lost money climb to podiums and declare their relief. A small, old woman in a red coat calls out the truth about greed. Teenagers make memes. The internet rips Fallon’s empire apart.
Inside, Fallon breaks. She gets on her knees and begs the shareholders. “Please!” she wails. “Please, I will give you everything!”
A shareholder who took a loan from her years ago stands and spits in her direction. A security guard calls out that her private accounts are cleared. Her husband files for an immediate divorce. She has lost the trust that buys you silence.
She is arrested later that day, handcuffed under the bright press lights. Her pleas echo off the marble like a bad record. A videographer records her kneeling: hair matted, makeup smudged, skin shining with the tears that come with public disgrace. One of her once-closest collaborators falls to a chair and cries in a way that feels like the world is ending.
The fall is total: she loses job and money, her company is hollowed out, sponsors abandon their contracts, her social feeds are scrubbed of her smiling face, old friends delete photos. People who loved her now call her a monster. Her name sits on the trending list for two weeks. It is not enough to simply be jailed; she must be undone. Investors drop the company stock in a parade of forced divestments. A board member’s son publicly slaps a reporter who asks for a comment and is fired. The ripple is enormous. People who helped her earlier erase their messages. The wealthy clients who once paid for her favors ask for their money back.
I watch Fallon escorted away and I do not dance. I sit with Marcus and Greyson and a small, private sense of rightness settles like dust. The woman who built her life on other people’s ruins lies defeated. And I have my leverage.
*
Afterwards, life reconstructs strangely.
Greyson keeps his promise. I move into the estate because it is the only place Fallon’s people will not reach easily. He sets a room aside for me with curtains and a tiny sewing kit. Marcus claims my bed the first night and falls asleep on my feet like a small guard.
“You said you wouldn’t be my keeper,” I tell Greyson one afternoon while he watches Marcus stack blocks.
“I said you would answer my phone,” he replies. “You walked into my house.”
“It was a short walk,” I say.
Greyson smiles, a little. “You leave bruises on me,” he says, deadpan, “and on my patience.”
We have rules because he likes order. “Be on call,” he says. “Come when I send the car. You will wear a private line. Do not go to any board meetings alone.”
I write a list of rules for myself. Rule one: do not sleep with the man who is more dangerous than the city. Rule two: do not fall for his soft side. Rule three: do not let Marcus call you mama unless you mean it.
Marcus barges in. “Mama, can we play?” he asks.
It happens like slow water. I spend afternoons teaching Marcus to tie shoelaces. He teaches me where the good hiding spots are in the hedge. Greyson watches us from the kitchen and sometimes leaves a mug on the table when he should have left a check. He texts me from meetings: Did you eat? Did you sleep? Do you want the car? Sometimes his text reads only: “Be safe.” I refuse to type back: “I am safe with you.” I am not wise enough to think these things like a machine.
We sharpen each other. He is all orders and restraint in the world and I am a blade with a history. He does not soften like butter. He watches me rebound from hurt and still offers a hand when a stair slips. When Fallon’s legal team sues for defamation (a stalling tactic), we stand firm. When the media wants a story about “the woman who came back,” Greyson’s lawyer answers with a simple threat: “Mess with her, we ruin you.”
The public tastes stories of redemption like sugar. They want a clear arc. They want to see the woman once broken and then fixed. They want to watch the billionaire with a frozen heart thaw, and they are all too ready to believe. We play that game when we have to, but in private it is simpler: Marcus needs a bedtime story, and Greyson leaves his journal open by the fireplace in which he writes, once, “Do not break her.”
“Do you write that often?” I ask when I find it.
Greyson’s face flares, then goes blank. “Not for you.”
“Oh, stop being silly.” I try to be indignant but Marcus is watching and he squeals. “Tell me a story,” he says.
Greyson tells the story and his voice is low and a little rough. He uses the boy’s real name and makes a dragon that guards a small, loud family. His fingers find mine and hold them for a second, just a second too long. If sunlight can be a blade, then the touch is sharp and warming.
We never speak of the bank accounts or the contracts again. We speak instead of Marcus’s school, of scrambling eggs, of a stupid movie he loves. He begins to call me Mallory without the question in his voice. He asks me for ribbons and I buy them, soft and pink. It is ridiculous and bright and it is, somehow, mine.
*
Of course, the world is not simple. The Ye family licks their wounds. They still have money and cunning. Fallon is arraigned but she has lawyers and assets and people who will keep trying to claw back what she lost. The press never forgets the smell of scandal. Ye Holdings sues anyone who mutters their name. There are raids and countersuits and late-night threats that fall like winter rust. But the sharpest of their weapons has been broken.
One night a man from their old guard tries to break into the estate. He is not subtle. He imagines a knife, a quick grab. He doesn’t find my small steel; he finds my reaction. I am quicker now. I have learned how to move without being seen. The man is out before he can read the stones of the heel on his back. He sits on the porch steps with a broken phone and a black eye and a small pile of shame.
“You don’t need to do that,” Greyson says when I tell him afterward.
“I do,” I answer. “For Marcus. For me.”
Greyson takes my hand. “You have it.”
*
There are softer moments too. Marcus wakes early and draws me pictures of us in a huge bed that looks suspiciously like the estate garden. He puts little stickers on my back when he thinks I am asleep. He tells Greyson with the sweetness of belief, “Mallory is brave,” and Greyson melts like sugar in hot tea.
There is fun in the small private cruelties we exchange. I hide the TV remote like mischief, and Greyson hides my keys. We bicker like a town crier and a scribe. Sometimes he will stand at the top of the stairs in the morning wearing slippers and he’ll say, “Kiss,” like a command, and I will give him one because sometimes the simplest obedient things are what save people.
One winter evening, Marcus falls asleep on the couch and Greyson makes a face at me. “He won’t call you mama forever,” he says.
“I don’t expect him to,” I reply. “I expect a child to be a child and a man to be a man.”
He nods. “Good,” he says. “Then we’ll take it slow.”
We do not speak the unspeakable—what our lives would become when the storm is over. We simply do the each-day things that mean the most: clean plates, change sheets, tie shoelaces, read stories with odd voices.
*
Fallon’s trial draws months. The court sentences her for fraud and perjury and dozens of smaller crimes. She gets jail time and an order to pay restitution. Her company is broken into pieces. Her name becomes a cautionary tale. The public watches a woman who once smiled on the covers of magazines now queue for bread and pity. Her plea for mercy is printed and streamed and debated. She becomes a figure of pity and contempt and sometimes both.
At the sentencing hearing she looks at me for a long time. “You should be grateful,” she says. “I gave you a life you could not have chosen.”
“You took a child from me,” I answer. “You stole time I cannot reclaim.”
She collapses into a blubbering mess. “I loved him,” she whispers, meaning a man who never loved her back the way she wanted.
“Love is not ownership,” I say. “Not if it kills.”
When the gavel falls, Fallon pleads for anything. People make videos of her begging. I watch, cold. The man she thought would protect her divorces her. Her network collapses, and the donations to her charities are frozen and then redirected to the victims who had been harmed by the empire she built.
Justice is messy, and far too often insufficient. It does not bring back nights in a cell. It cannot rebuild stolen years. But it makes their names echo in courtrooms and newsrooms and, for a moment, the city feels a little more balanced.
*
Months later, long after the cameras thin, I stand in a small office inside Ye Holdings, handing over a legal signature. Ye Xun, Fallon’s sister, stands beside me, pale and trembling. She looks at me with the shadow of what she called me once: ‘a monster.’
“Take it,” I tell her. “Tell them where to find the missing records. Make sure the truth of the mayor’s death is on the record. Speak with the prosecutor.”
She nods, because she knows that if she does not, someone worse than Fallon will keep the lies alive.
Outside the office, Greyson waits. The man who once towered over every room in the city now smiles, simple and honest as a child. Marcus runs into his arms. Greyson lifts him up and twirls him until the boy squeals.
He looks at me when the small carnival dies. “Did you get what you came for?”
I reach into my bag and lay out a paper. It is a thin slip: the percent of shares in Ye Media transferred back to my name—a right I never expected to see again. I read the number, and for the first time in a long time the world rebalances itself in my body.
“You will manage it?” Greyson asks.
“I will,” I say. “I will keep it honest.”
He nods as if he had expected nothing less. “Good.”
Marcus looks at us and says, solemn as an oracle, “Mallory, do you want to live here?”
I glance at Greyson then at the child. I think of the warehouse, the cold floors, the blood, the nights in clinics, the training that made my hands weapons. I think of the long, slow time I spent trying not to hate myself.
“I do,” I say.
Greyson’s face changes in a soft way I have only ever seen twice: once when he first met his son, and once now. He reaches for my hand and this time he does not let go like a landlord with a lease. He holds it like a person who has brought someone inside from the cold.
“You could have anything,” he says. “What do you want?”
I breathe the winter air and taste it like a promise. For a long while, I wanted to hold one thing: proof. Proof that I had been wronged. Proof that the world could be fair.
“Not everything,” I say. “Just one more morning like this.”
He smiles and then he smiles again. Marcus makes a pretend crown out of his hands and drops it on my head.
“Queen,” he declares.
I laugh and my laugh is real.
Years later, when people ask me how I went from a prisoner to a woman with a child, a company stake, and a quiet life under Greyson’s roof, I tell them a small truth: “I kept moving forward.”
Greyson hears that and makes a sour face. “You say it like it was a choice.”
“It was,” I say. “I chose to come back.”
He makes a small, private sound and squeezes my hand. “And I chose to keep you.”
Outside, the city moves, people gossip, markets rise and fall. Inside our rooms we knit a life so ordinary it feels like a revolution. Marcus draws a picture of us on the front lawn. We hang it on the kitchen door.
Sometimes at night, when the house is quiet and the world is sleeping, Greyson will stand over me and whisper, “Do you remember your first day?”
“Every detail,” I say. “The floor, the smell, the woman I hated.”
“That’s a long way,” he says.
“It was,” I agree.
He kisses my forehead, not like a show but like a pledge. Marcus snores like a small engine. The papers on our table speak of dividends rather than revenge.
A week later, at a small council meeting, Ye Holdings officially returns the ten percent ownership to me. The papers bear signatures and numbers and lots of fine print. I sign my name, a woman who knows how to write under pressure, and the board trembles.
Afterward, in a private corridor, Fallon’s lawyer passes me and spits, “You think having money will fix everything?”
“No,” I say. “It won’t. But it makes sure you can’t stomp on people you don’t like.”
He laughs ugly. “You’re not happy.”
I stop and look him straight in the face. “I am alive,” I say. “I have a small boy who calls me ‘mama’ when he thinks no one is looking. I have a life that keeps me busy. I have the power to stop monsters like you.”
He looks like he expected me to beg or to cry. I don’t. I don’t now.
Greyson is waiting at the elevator, arms folded, face unreadable.
“You looked impressive today,” he says.
“Thanks,” I answer. “You looked expensive.”
He lets out a small laugh. “We are both dangerous.”
We walk down the hallway together. Marcus runs ahead, his sneakers slap-slap on tile. He is not a treasure to be defended by a queen or a hunted prize. He is a loud, sticky human with an unbroken laugh. He will grow and perhaps find some other life.
Fallon will rot out in the stories of bad people. Her company will limp on or splinter. People will talk. People always talk. I will stand in the middle of a new life and learn how to be gentle with myself.
At night when Marcus sleeps and the house is full of small noises, Greyson turns to me and asks, “Are you content?”
I take his hand and squeeze it back so hard he lets out a small surprise.
“Not always,” I say. “But often enough.”
He kisses my knuckles then, a small, fierce gesture, and the world is simply a house and a man and a child and a woman who has returned from the edge.
Outside in the streetlights, the city pulses on, greedy and bright. Inside, I make tea and fold laundry and write one last note into my old journal: I came back for blood and found a home. It is merciful and messy and mine.
The End
— Thank you for reading —