Billionaire Romance15 min read
"I Hit Him With a Lamp" — I Came Back, I Married the Billionaire, I Broke Them
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"I hit him."
I remember the lamp flying out of my hands and cracking across his skull.
"He won't move," I whispered, my voice small in that white room, the lamp handle slick in my palm.
"You killed him!" Greta's voice cut through like a blade.
"No, I didn't," I said. "I didn't—"
"She did it, Father. She killed him," Benedict shouted, and then he slapped me so hard my teeth hurt.
They all moved like they had practiced this. Marcus Durham stood in the doorway with the calm face of a man who could sign papers and ruin lives.
"Served him right," Benedict said. "You thought you'd get his favors alone?"
I tasted blood. I tasted lamp dust. I tasted the cold, sudden empty feeling that had followed me all the way up the hotel stairs.
"Helena," I heard one voice call, softer. For a second I thought it was real. For a second I thought love would save me.
"We staged the whole thing," Greta purred as she rested her hand on Benedict's arm. "You know how to play your part, right? She gets drunk, she loses track. She takes the blame."
"I never—" My voice broke.
"You were supposed to obey," Benedict said. "We were supposed to play husband and wife for a night."
They laughed. They turned me into a joke. Then they picked me up and walked me to the window.
"Don't struggle," Benedict said. "Make it look real."
They didn't shove me.
They threw me.
The city slid up and down and then everything went black.
"Where is she?" a voice woke me. I opened my eyes to a room I knew.
"She's awake. Thank God." Ervin Ramos, the butler, was there. Tears in his eyes.
"Helena, you okay?" Marcus Durham smiled with practice love.
I touched my head. Bandage. Hospital smell. My whole life played again in neat, wrong order.
"I died," I said.
"Car crash," Ervin said, careful. "You were hurt, miss. You—" He stopped.
I turned my head and thought of the lamp, of the hotel room, of the man on the bed, of the cold wind under my guts as I fell. Every face came back in the same bright lines: Benedict smiling like he owned me, Greta's painted eyes, Kendra Calderon's slow, soft hands.
They had planned to plant me as the fall guy for a hole in the company. They had planned to kill me. They had done it.
But the room was warm. My bandage was dry. The air smelled like antiseptic and hope. I sucked in a breath and felt something fierce rise inside me.
"I woke up," I said to myself. "I woke up. I get to try again."
"Don't talk so loud," Ervin said. "They'll worry themselves to death."
"Good," I said. "Let them worry."
I learned to play their part as well as they had played me.
"You're back," Marcus said later in the big house as the driver closed the car door. He kissed my forehead with an actor's care. "You missed a lot."
"I was tired," I said, and kept the cold smile that kept him happy.
Greta swept into the room, all silk and sharp nails. "Sister, you look thin. You should eat. Daddy made a fuss."
"Thank you," I said.
I learned two things inside a day: that the people I had called family were actors with cold brains and loose hearts, and that I could hold my face like a mask and listen.
They wanted to test me. They would try to make me fail again. They would try to make me take the fall.
I had a counterplot.
"You remember Gu's boy?" Ervin had said once, fifteen years ago, when I was small and lost on a rainy street. "Brecken Xu's a hard man, but he remembers faces."
Brecken Xu. The man everyone called a prince of business. The richest man whose face made women hold their breath. He was the man who would stand on the cliff between me and survival.
"Heard he's cold," Marcus said the night of the dinner. "No nonsense."
Greta grinned. "Perfect. We will bring you to the youth wine gala. Let her be foolish in public."
"Let our little country bumpkin crash the party," Kendra said. "We will watch and laugh."
They wanted me to lose.
"Good," I told Ervin after they left. "I will lose. Then I will win."
The next night at the gala I played the part better. I put on a dress that looked older than the girls in the room, acted like I hadn't seen a fork in a while, and then I did something loud and deliberate.
"To new friends!" I cried, grabbing a glass.
Someone muttered something. Greta's friends laughed.
I tipped the wine back like I had no rules.
"Helena, don't—" Greta hissed.
And then I vomited a small stream of red over Brecken Xu.
Silence crashed.
"God!" someone shouted.
Brecken's jaw tightened. He looked down at the stain on his suit. He stood. He walked toward me like a god approaching a moth.
"You ruined my suit," he said.
"I—I'm sorry," I said, voice all small. "I'm so sorry."
He could have sent people to drag me out. He could have done worse. He didn't.
He took me to his suite.
"I am Brecken Xu," he said when the door shut. "You have made a show of yourself."
"You have every right to throw me out," I said. "But you won't. Because you like a good show."
He laughed once, low. He sat at the far side of the room, stared at me, then said, "Why did you do that?"
"I needed you to see me," I answered. "I have a grandmother to protect. My family will try to kill her to hide what they did. I need help."
He inhaled, like smoke. "You expect me to protect an old woman because you vomited on me?"
"I have wine to trade," I said. "And wine cellars. And a name you might want to buy."
"Wine?" His eyes flicked. "Prove it."
So I lied better than I had before. "I make wine," I said. "Good wine. I will bring you a bottle. Let you taste it. If it's good, you protect my grandmother."
He smiled then, the kind that touched his whole face. "What will you be if I help?"
"My...my fiancée for now," I said. My chest hitched when the words came out. They were both slow and dangerous.
"You are trading yourself," he said. "You could have asked for money."
"Money doesn't protect people from knives," I said.
He watched me, cold and intelligent. "You give me wine and cellar access. I give you protection."
"What will you want from me in public?" I asked.
"To be my fiancée," he answered simply. "Public enough to stop them. Not public enough to make you a girl in a parade."
I thought of the hotel lamp. I thought of the wind under my body. I said yes.
"You will have a ring," he said. "You will have a shield. You will wear both."
"Deal," I said.
We signed the contract in silent words and a handshake neither of us needed to write.
The next days were theater. I let them see me as useless and grateful. I let them buy me expensive clothes and believe they had me in their hands.
"You're going to work at the company," Marcus told me one morning. "We will make the public proud."
"I want to learn," I said. "I want to help."
"You'll be on the management team," Greta said sweetly. "But don't worry. It's safe. You'll never touch the books."
Inside, I laughed quietly. I was about to touch the books and hold them close.
Brecken appeared when necessary: a text, a shadow at the Gala, a careful word. He was a wall with soft edges and rough hands. He sat at a meeting once and watched how they moved. He didn't speak much. He only watched.
"You stay close to him," Ervin warned. "He protects, but he asks for parts of life."
"I know," I said. "I have already traded the first part."
I learned the company's secrets as they tried to teach me nothing. I watched ledger lines. I learned who moved money to who. I sat at meetings where men with fine ties spoke words that hid numbers. I made friends with the cooks. I learned about the dinners, about the night they had pretended to make me drunk before. I learned about the small green box where Kendra kept private lists.
One night, I walked the back stairs and sat where the chef kept his papers.
"Why are you here, miss?" he asked, surprised.
"Just tired," I said. "Do you have a wine I can steal?"
He laughed.
"Call me Helena," I said. "Not miss."
He called me Helena.
Little things. Small people. The world is made of small people who remember.
Greta and Kendra and Benedict plotted. They thought I still lived inside their chest.
"She will crack in a month," Kendra told Marcus. "You will see."
"She will break," Greta sang.
"I will not," I told myself in the dark. "I will break them."
We planned carefully with Brecken. He put men like Ervin on our side. He placed cameras where they would not feel watched. He left small gifts that looked like accidents but were not.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked Brecken one day when he waved me into his office.
"Because," he said simply, "I do not like liars who feed on weak things."
"Because I traded wine," I pushed.
"Because you stood in front of me and vomited," he said, looking at me with a crater of memory. "That takes guts in a woman who fell out of a building and came back."
"Excuse me?" I said.
He smiled like a blade. "You are unusual. I wanted to know more."
I had two things then: a ring and a man with big money who would stand in doorways. Now I needed to pull threads and cut them in public.
The night I chose was not a private night. It was the shareholders' gala and press meeting for the company's new line. Every face would be in the room. Cameras would crawl like beetles. If I wanted them to fall, I needed to push them off in front of everyone.
"You're sure?" Brecken asked.
"Yes," I said. "We go tonight."
We prepared a video first. I had Ervin find a phone. The cook gave a testimony. A former accountant who had been fired for asking questions gave us an old thumb drive. We had bank statements, wire transfers to secret accounts that matched fake contracts, emails between Marcus and unknown accounts, a recorded phone call where Benedict confirmed the plan to frame me.
"Do you have proof of the poisoning?" Brecken asked.
The chef handed in a bag with receipts and his note about the exact dish combinations. The cook had been scared. He gave us a shaky tape: Kendra's voice instructing him to serve the two dishes together. The chef had recorded it and pretended not to know. He would not eat his food anymore, but he would speak.
We walked into the hall like actors. Brecken stood on the side. I walked to the front and asked for the floor.
"Miss Helena Carvalho wants to say a few words," the emcee said, thinking me a small statue of the company's kindness.
"Leave the mic open," Brecken whispered.
I took the microphone.
"Thank you all for coming," I said.
"She must be preparing to sing," someone joked. A ripple of laughter.
"Not tonight," I said. "I want to show you what happens when you think you can kill and hide."
The room went still like a field that feels rain.
"Play it," Brecken said.
The screen lit. I watched faces change on screen: Marcus's smile fell when the bank lines moved. Greta's mascara painted a line down her cheek before the film had even finished.
"That's my voice," Kendra shouted. "That's a fake—"
"Stop it," I said, and the room watched the video where Kendra's voice explained which food and why.
"You told the cook," I said. "You told him to do this so I would take the blame. You told Benedict to push me. You told Marcus to hide the money. You thought no one would remember."
"That's a lie!" Marcus screamed. His hands shook.
"No, it's not." The video showed a wire transfer. It showed a picture of the driver placing a box labeled for payment. It showed emails. They were all marked to dates when the company needed money and when I was back in the city.
"You can't—" Greta breathed.
"Denial won't save you now," I said. "You shouted that you wanted me gone. You threw me off a roof."
"No!" Benedict cried. He lunged.
Security moved fast. But this was not my plan's end. This was the start.
"Press," Brecken said quietly. "Open the doors."
Reporters flooded in like bees. The cameras lit. Phones up. The room turned to a boiling pot of live images.
"Public statement," a woman with a mic said. "Is Helena Carvalho making an accusation? Marcus Durham, comments?"
Marcus stood like wax with a snapped smile. He was a man who built a life from numbers and lies. Now the numbers moved and ate him.
"Father—" Greta whispered, helpless.
"Helena!" Kendra cried, but the word had no arrow. It was thin as thread.
"You're all going on record," I said. "This tape is with legal. These wires are with the bank. We have copies at counsel, at the regulator, and in every journalist's hands."
Someone shouted. I watched as faces hardened. Investors pushed people with phones. Somewhere a lawyer shouted for calm.
"This is theft," a board member said. "Marcus—"
"Freeze his accounts," Brecken muttered into a phone. "Do it now."
Within minutes the first domino dropped. People with suits moved. Bank calls. Brecken's men were quiet workhorses. They had prepped. They had the judge on speed dial like a friend.
"What's happening?" Marcus asked, and the sound of a man losing everything hit the room like glass.
"You're under investigation," the regulator said into a camera that streamed to the world. "We have evidence. We will act."
"You're ruining our family!" Kendra howled, screaming as if that would curl the laws.
"Not ruined," I said. "Cleared."
Then we brought out our final piece — the chef in the kitchen, live on the floor, mouthing the words he'd saved. He read the notes. He cried. He said Kendra's words in a room of microphones.
Greta's eyes filled. Then she turned to her own phone and dropped it. Someone caught the clip.
"People are recording," a man said. "The whole thing is on the net."
It didn't take long.
The crowd moved like a tide toward the exits, toward the lights, toward the buzzing world outside.
"Is this a setup?" a man in the back yelled.
"No," I said. "It is what you did."
Greta lunged at me and tried to slap. Security stopped her. Cameras flashed. She screamed and yelled and then fell to her knees in front of the press with a face that the camera made holy.
"Please!" she cried. "Please don't take everything!"
Someone in the crowd shouted and the phrase "shame" was shouted back like a decree. People took out phones. "She pushed her sister off a roof!" they cried. "She tried to kill a woman!" The crowd turned in reflex, and the recorded video returned faster: people rewatched the old hotel footage we had. The internet is a hungry thing; it chews and repeats.
"Greta, you planned this," I said. "You and Kendra and Benedict."
"You're lying!" she screamed, but no one believed enough to turn the tide.
Benedict tried to run. He was stopped at the door by a security man working for Brecken's group. "You are under arrest for conspiracy," a polite voice said. Police arrived with quiet heavy steps. Benedict's jaw went pale.
"No!" he cried. "Arrest is a mistake!" He fell to his knees. He begged. "Please," he panted. "Please don't."
They put handcuffs on him on the floor with the lights bright and the cameras amused. He screamed at the cameras, but the cameras only fed him back to the world. Someone filmed him and uploaded the clip. It trended in the hour like a storm.
Marcus dropped to his knees and began to tremble. His partners called. They withdrew offers. The board met and asked his resignation. He stood like an animal pinned. His bank lines froze. His stock dropped. The law is a machine. It eats mistakes.
"Please—" Marcus said. "Please stop. I am sorry."
They made no show of mercy. The rules of revenge are not mercy.
Kendra's face betrayed years of slow cruelty. She tried to leave, but ushers with Brecken's men kept her close. They carried the account printouts, printed statements, email logs. They signed them with a smile.
"Your assets are frozen," the regulator said loud enough for the feed.
"Your house is being evaluated," said a lawyer on Brecken's team.
Greta fell to the floor and clawed at her hair as the cameras circled. People threw the word "traitor" like sticks. She shouted and scratched and then looked up at me with a face swollen and red.
"Please," she begged, voice broken. "I will do anything."
"Anything?" I asked.
"Yes. Please."
"Everything you did to my mother and my grandmother," I said. "Everything you did to me. Public apology. Surrender control to authorities. Give back every penny you took."
"Give back?" She looked like a child gleeful at a promised toy and then frightened to lose it.
"Yes," I said. "In front of cameras."
They filmed.
Greta knelt and said her name.
"I'm Greta Copeland," she said. "I lied. I hurt someone. I ask forgiveness."
Her face was wet with mascara and shame. Her husband—Benedict—was led in handcuffs into a car by police. He had no supporters left. Partner firms publicly announced distance.
Social media stacked itself in minutes. Reporters called Brecken's PR hot line. He gave a short statement: "The company will be audited. We support full transparency. Justice will be done."
Within the hour there were vans outside the house. There was a hum in the air. A thousand people watched and recorded. The world of gossip forks into two parts: those who watch and those who judge.
Greta's friends deleted photos. Her phone filled with messages. Her mother, Kendra, tried to beg and was laughed at by a thousand strangers. Her face went white. She fell to the carpet and slapped her own face as if to puncture the world.
They lost everything. They had the public, the law, the banks, the partners, the board, the investors, and each other. The net is a long hand that turns on those who hurt.
For an hour after the cameras left, they stayed in a heap. People came to gawk. Someone shouted "Shame!" again. They filmed and laughed. Journalists circled. Videos went viral.
I watched them fall. I sat with Brecken near the back, hands folded, ring warm on my finger. He did not touch me then. He only offered water.
"Do you feel better?" he asked.
"Not yet," I said.
"Good." He smiled. "We'll still finish."
We did. More papers were filed. More cameras filmed. The law took what it took. Those who had stolen lost it on the world map of shame.
Greta's breakdown spilled into court. Benedict's assets were tied up for debt. Marcus's company was seized for audit. Kendra was stripped of her position. They were all humiliated in ways that matched what they'd done to me.
No mercy. No easy pity.
When the dust settled, I walked to the window and saw a dry shape of myself reflecting in the glass. Brecken stepped beside me.
"Did you get what you wanted?" he asked quietly.
"Not yet," I said.
He turned to me then and did something he had not done in the entire war. He took my hand.
"Then what is next?" he asked.
"I want them gone," I said. "Gone from my life and unable to touch my grandmother."
He nodded. "They are gone."
"Will you stay?" I asked.
He looked down at his hand holding mine. "I will stay," he said.
That night, we walked into the empty wine cellar I had promised him. The smell of oak and time hung in the air. There was a bottle there I had made years ago in a shed under a small roof. It was the bottle I had brought to him at the coffee shop.
"Open it," he said.
I uncorked the bottle and poured two small glasses.
"To beginning?" he said, lifting his.
"To ending what was broken," I answered.
He tasted my wine. His face changed in a simple way. He smiled without the edge, and then he said, "Marry me for real."
I looked at him. In the light, he seemed less a prince of finance and more a man who had chosen his ground.
"Will you?" he asked.
I thought of the lamp. I thought of the fall. I thought of the night that had been stolen.
"Yes," I said.
He slid the ring back on my finger. It fit like a pact.
"What will you call this story?" he asked afterward, as we walked up the cellar steps toward the light.
"A hard one," I said.
He smiled and kissed the side of my mouth like a promise.
The next mornings were quiet. The press had moved from the scandal to the stock changes and the arrests. Greta Copeland pleaded guilty and sat in a small room full of reporters and recorders. Marcus's account numbers were frozen. Benedict Andrews sat cuffed at a bench, begging, his voice small on the feed.
I had revenge. It was not loud fireworks; it was quiet, surgical, and public. They had suffered shattering falls. They had the shame, the cameras, the judges, the loss of money, the broken marriages and friends. They had everything the rules demanded.
Brecken and I stood together on a balcony. He put his coat around my shoulders.
"You worked well," he said.
"I had a teacher," I said. "You."
He laughed softly. "And wine."
"Yes," I said. "And wine."
My last thought as I leaned into him was a small echo from the hospital where Ervin had pressed my hand: protect the ones you love.
I had been someone who fell. I had been someone who loved wrong men for years. I had been a pawn. I had been dead.
Now I was not.
I kept my ring warm on my finger and, at the house at night, I would open the small bottle I had made for my grandmother and press a sip to her lips when she visited. I told her nothing of the rage and the plans. I let her laugh and knit and ask the same questions about the garden as she always had.
"Are you happy?" she asked once, when the sun flooded the parlor and Brecken carved the roast like an old man.
"I'm safe," I said. "And you are safe."
She smiled, free of fear.
The lamp was back in my head sometimes. I told myself not to forget. The lamp had been a weapon when I had nothing else.
Now my weapons were law and truth and a man who could doors and a bottle of wine good enough to buy a life.
"Will we tell our children?" Brecken asked once, when the night was small and clean, and my fingers rested on the cool wood of an old table.
"What part?" I asked.
"About who you were before."
"Tell them I was brave," I said. "Tell them I was stubborn. Tell them I fell and learned to rise."
He kissed my knuckles then like a benediction.
We had money and a company that had been cleaned, and we had a press that loved a story that ended in justice.
They watched from far away as the guilty went away. They watched my old house emptied by the court. They watched greed punished.
And me? I counted my wins not by the number of headlines but by the number of nights my grandmother slept without fear, and the number of mornings I woke and brewed fresh coffee for the man beside me who had kissed me in a car and said, "You are not mine anymore. You're ours."
"Will you ever forgive them?" Brecken asked when the last accounts were closed and the media had gone away.
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe not. But I will not let them define my life again."
He put his forehead to mine.
"Then we keep moving," he said.
"Yes," I said.
We kept moving like people who had been given an extra biased gift, a second life. We used it to build something honest. I learned how to read balance sheets until they were as clear as the lines of my own hand. I learned how to let the light in and how to shut the door on people who wanted blood.
On quiet nights, I take out the bandaged lamp's memory in my head and place it on the shelf behind me as a relic. I don't show it to others. I don't need to. It is mine.
One evening, in the cellar, I uncorked a bottle labeled simply: For Grandma.
Brecken watched me pour, close, and place it into a small wooden box.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Saying thank you," I said.
He smiled and tucked his hand into mine. "Then tomorrow we begin again."
And we did. We began again in a house that smelled of wine and roast and new pages. We began again with a ring that meant safety instead of trap.
Outside, the world still spun. People still hurt. News still screamed. But inside the warm rooms, with a man who loved order and a grandmother who loved me, I held my wine glass and breathed.
"No more falling," I said to the room and to myself.
"Not with me," Brecken answered.
I laughed, poured him more wine, and watched the light turn the bottle to red.
The End
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