Billionaire Romance17 min read
She Threw a Knife, I Threw My Heart
ButterPicks15 views
"I want this city to breathe again," she shouted, then ripped open her shirt.
I froze on the leather chair and watched petals fly like an accident. Security moved like a blade. My assistant Eamon Reid looked at me, eyes wide, and mouthed, "What do we do?"
"Let her," I said.
Eamon didn't let her. He lunged forward and the scene became a bad movie: men in suits, a white mask on a young woman, a banner that said STOP THE FACTORY in felt-tip strokes, and a handmade knife flashing in her hand.
They pushed, she spit, a mask fell.
Her face hit the room like a bell. Her lips were a faint purple, her fingers stained with marker, her eyebrows hard as a line drawn with a ruler.
She met my eyes for a second and I didn't remember breathing.
"She's dangerous," Clancy Yamaguchi whispered.
"No," I said. "She's honest."
Eamon dragged me out. The guards made a soft ring around me like a flower guard. They drove me away to my car. I watched her from the rear window. She didn't run. She stood with the knife held high like a flag of pain.
Later, after the police, the tea, the headlines, I slept in a room full of monitors and receipts and the sound of my own pulse. I had to know her name.
"Find her," I told Eamon. "All of it."
He bowed, and he found everything.
"Her name is Indiana Rice," he said two days later, dropping a slim folder on my desk like a verdict.
"I remember a girl like that from when I was eight," I told him, fingers on the folder. "A small face, purple lips. I thought she was brave."
Eamon blinked. "You thought a girl looked brave because of purple lips?"
"I thought she looked honest." I touched the photo. "Bring me everything."
• • •
"Falcon," Eamon said, folding his long legs under his chair. He always sat like he planned on running at any second. "You cannot just collect people like... like products."
"Why not?" I said.
"Because people are not products," he said. "They sue."
"Then stop me if they do." I smiled.
He rolled his eyes and left. I opened the file: Indiana Rice, twenty-four, works at a tea bar on Third and River, helped neighborhoods organize against the plant, a volunteer during floods. The photos were rough—phone shots, security cameras, a grainy one of her arguing—her eyebrows like a drawn bow.
"She looks ridiculous," Clancy said when he saw the face on my screen. "Like a raccoon crying for justice."
"She looks alive," I said.
He scoffed. "Alive is not for board reports."
"She isn't a report," I said. "She's a cause."
Clancy tapped a finger on his desk. "So you plan to do what? Pay her off?"
"Change the plan," I said.
He choked on his coffee.
• • •
Two weeks earlier, I had been on the other end of a prank that became legend inside my company.
"Falcon, please keep your calm," Eamon had said a month before, when we worked up a harmless event to distract people from a thornier problem: a day-long "open matchmaking hour" that I never wanted but my uncle Emanuel Neumann insisted on as part of family duty.
They printed my face on glossy flyers and put a date. The building turned into a circus. Women, old and young, came in with banners, songs, and a hunger I didn't understand.
"Maybe this will teach you how it feels to be adored," Emanuel said, delighted, like he was setting out a feast.
I sat through the day, calm as a statue, while wave after wave of women arrived. Eamon had arranged the timing to make things interesting: a threepm crowd and a twopm possibility that would save or wreck the whole hour.
My assistant Clancy, bless his very straight heart, tried his best to manage the mess.
"Don't start fights," he said, low and panicked, when a gaggle of retired women staged a fainting contest in front of the door.
Then a girl came in late, dripping like a red lily into the room. She wore a red dress, tall heels, a sunglasses half cover. Eamon's smile collapsed a little.
"Hello. I'm—" she said, and I couldn't help but notice how the room watched her. She took off the lens in a slow, casual motion and flashed a smile dangerous as a knife.
Her name was Jenna—no, that was the stage name the press printed. The real paper read JENNINGS LEE. The world called her beautiful. I called it boring.
She sat by me like a story that had been opened and never closed. She asked to talk. I pushed a deck of cards on the table and offered Eamon a chance.
He joined, saving me by playing. The girl leaned toward me, voice low. "I can't play cards," she admitted. "But I can be interesting."
"Good," I said dryly. "Because I'm very different. I like numbers."
She laughed. We struggled through an hour in the theater of public dating—then Eamon hit his cue.
A burst of people poured in—women in every shape and color—and I became the sun they orbited. The room went loud and sweet and ridiculous. Jenna vanished like dew.
After the chaos, Eamon and I were on the pavement. He had dragged that late girl out, both of us laughing like idiots. He grabbed her hand suddenly and bolted down the street.
"Do you often drag people?" I asked.
"Only when I have to help," he said, as we ran, and I saw the actress peel off her heels and run, suddenly raw and laughing. Then she slapped him.
"You fool," she said. "You are a fool. And I hate your face."
Eamon grinned like a first-time roustabout. "Then come with me."
She didn't. She stormed off, big and red, heels clacking.
Eamon came back to me, hair a mess. "You are welcome," he said.
That was the first time I watched a woman choose her own exit and it felt like the most honest thing in the world. I had no idea then that honesty would become a habit I would crave.
• • •
Indiana Rice was not beautiful to the world. The tea bar she worked in smelled like jasmine and steam and old wood. It was honest work in the city’s thinning seams.
I met her because she lost a napkin on our lobby steps and her knee bled a little from the gravel. Eamon fetched a first aid kit without being asked.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
She spat out, "I don't need questions. I need clean air."
"Do you like where you work?" I tried.
She narrowed her eyes. "Do you like where you live? Do you like breathing? Do you like people not coughing at night?"
Eamon and Clancy looked mortified. "Sir," Clancy whispered. "Maybe don't—"
She laughed, sharp and kind. "I can see you don't get it, Mr. Williams. That's fine. Most of your kind don't."
I liked the way she jabbed at me. It was like a safe punch. She had the kind of hate that felt personal and useful.
"I don't want to be your enemy," I said.
"Good," she said. "Then stop building things I can't breathe near."
"Which plant?" I asked.
"Your next one," she said. "The one they want to plant on the edge of our neighborhood because land is cheap there and greed is not. It will live there like a tumor."
I folded my hands.
"If this was a meeting," I said, "I'd ask you to sit."
She didn't sit. "You will listen."
"All right," I told her, and then we had a strange hour where she told me about tar-stained gutters, about a father who coughed like an old road, and about nights she kept watch over windows just to count headlights and believe the sky could still be blue.
She used humor like a callused tool. She threw a lemon at a board member once for suggesting they relocate "a few poor families" as if people were cushions. I loved how she said the words poor and people like they belonged on opposite ends of the same rope.
"You're very honest," I told her once, when the steam fogged the air between us.
"My part of town taught me honesty," she said. "It also taught me that a man like you will listen better when it hurts."
"Then make me hurt," I said.
She smiled, the small one that meant she understood a dare and would accept it.
• • •
The accident happened on a street you could cross in thirty steps if you wanted to run. I had been impatient that day. I had been in so many rooms that you would think my skin had polishing, but it had not. I had a broken rhythm of sleep and a phone with more messages than friends.
She misjudged a taxi.
I was thirty feet away when a black car ran the light.
"I'll move her," a man shouted.
No one moved. They all froze like a bird that had seen its own shadow.
Then Eamon crashed his palm to the ground and pushed. I moved too. We both saw the car first. Indiana did not—she had her back to the street, an open bag in her hand, and a whole life folded in her ribs.
"If you don't get out," I said, and I don't know why those words left my mouth, "I will break him."
I remember the sound the metal made when it hit her bag. I remember the smell of gasoline. There was a single, terrible, sharp moment: a throw forward, a breath, a folded trumpet of noise.
I dragged her to the curb. Her lips were purple and I felt that childhood memory like a hand on my throat. She looked at me like she had been waiting for someone to be brave.
"Why did you do it?" she asked when the first ambulance sirens came.
"Because you pissed me off," I said, and the line that followed should have been softer, but I think it landed like a bandage. "Because I can't stand people who go quietly under."
She laughed, a small, shocked sound. "You dragged me like a sack of flour."
"You're not a sack," I whispered. "You're like… a person who fights."
She swore at me. She told me I was a terrible man for pushing her into danger, then she laughed about it and asked for water. She kept trying to stand, and each time a nurse told her no, and she tried again.
We both ended up in the same emergency room because I insisted she stay. Eamon and Clancy argued with the staff like rich men who always assumed the world worked the way they did. Finally they let us be in the same room, alone on a quiet floor, two broken ships in paper armor.
"You're waking," a nurse said, and her head slammed back like a bell.
"I thought you were dead," I joked, in a voice I didn't own.
"You thought wrong," she said. Her voice was a crooked sunrise. "You thought I was a show, huh?"
"You were a show," I said. "A very dangerous show."
We argued then like two kids stealing toys. I told her she shouldn't have been on the street, she told me to mind my business, and I told her I had tried to move her without permission and felt foolish for trying to be a rescuer.
"You kept yelling at the car," she said. "Police would have laughed."
"Then I yelled louder," I said.
She closed her eyes and smiled like we were in a cinema. "You have terrible timing."
"Your timing isn't great either," I said.
She bit my thumb with a weak courage. "Don't get attached," she said.
"Too late," I said.
• • •
At the hospital, they covered her in flowers.
"Eamon," I said. "No flowers."
"It's hospital charm," he said. "It shows concern."
"She is allergic to lilies," I said. "Our files?"
He frowned. "No."
"Ask," I said. "Now."
The nurses checked. Of course she was allergic to lilies. She had told me once, months earlier, she could barely stand them. My office, my bills, my charity schedule—none of it mattered at that second.
"Take them away," I said.
They didn't. A nurse thought lilies were a sign of respect. The flowers came in like a tide—white lilies with the smell of old money and yesterday's perfumes.
Indiana's face swelled. Her throat tightened.
"Call the doctor," I screamed.
They did.
When her eyes reopened and she looked at me with a face like a small animal, the whole room was the quietest place I had ever known.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't tell them. I didn't—"
She coughed, a small dry sound. "I thought you liked lilies."
"I don't like them near the one person who hates them," I said.
She blinked. "Flattery is cheap."
"I pay a lot for the cheap things," I admitted.
She laughed through a breath and reached for my hand like it was a raft.
"Don't make me like you," she warned.
"Too late," I said.
• • •
The rest of the city was loud with meetings about press and the plant and shareholders and what would be called a "reputational risk."
My uncle Emanuel called.
"Falcon," he said, voice wrapped in sympathy and a hint of anger, "you are underestimating the stakes."
"No," I said. "I am changing the stakes."
"Economic impact," he said. "Jobs."
"Yes," I said. "But not like this. Not here. Not at the cost of their lungs."
He sighed. "Do you have proof the plant would be harmful?"
"I have a girl who uses the word tumor for my project site," I said. "She has a list of health outcomes. She knows her neighborhood. She knows how to fight. She can push a whole council. She can break a story."
"You want to go public with this?"
"I want to stop a factory and start a fund to support new clean jobs in that district."
There was a long pause. "You are serious."
"Very."
After the stunt at the hospital got into the press—"CEO rescues protester," the papers bled in gullible fonts—there was a storm. People loved moral rescue like a machine loves oil. Senators called. Board members called. A few younger directors looked at me like I had thrown away a pie and found a pearl.
"You will anger your investors," a board member warned. "You will cost the company millions."
"Or save us millions in fines and lawsuits," I said.
That didn't comfort them. Money speaks. It is a blunt instrument that never learns to whisper.
We held a public meeting in a hall that smelled like polished wood and fresh paint.
"I grew up near a factory," Indiana said into the microphone. She swallowed once, then again, and stood taller than the podium let her. "My father coughed until his voice wore out. We used to count how many gray days we saw in the year. Once, in winter, the ash in the air made our sheets gray. Hands are for work. Lungs are for life. If a company puts a plant where people sleep poorly, it's not progress. It's theft."
The room was wide and hot. Reports tried to find her inconsistency. My PR team found me in the back and looked guilty like I've forced them into birdcages.
"Eamon," I said later. "Tell them to pull the plan."
He looked at me, astonished. "You really mean stop it."
"I do," I said. "And build a clean energy hub in that district instead. Retrain the workers."
He started making calls like someone ordering an extra to-do list for his heart.
The meeting turned from ire to confusion to a slow clapping. People who had not thought of water and lungs suddenly had to.
• • •
At night, when the city quieted, Indiana and I walked the edge of a park she used to map out with children to show where the sky still held blue.
"You didn't have to stop the factory for me," she said.
"I know," I said. "But I did."
She hit my arm lightly. "Do not be proud of this like it's a hat you can wear."
"I'm not proud," I said. "I am… changed."
She stopped. "Changed or anxious?"
"Both."
She laughed. "You sound like a poem."
"I'm not a poem," I said.
"You are when you talk about guilt," she said. "You shape your guilt like a lover."
"I don't know how to love without guilt," I admitted.
"You will learn," she said. "Or you will teach me how to throw up less."
We kissed then, clumsy and earnest. Her mouth was cool and tasted of tea, and for a moment I forgot what power felt like and just felt a hand on my back. It was heavy and safe.
"I'm terrible at slow things," I told her. "I want results like a machine."
"Then be terrible with me," she said. "I like awful machines."
• • •
There was much to change.
I had to give orders about money and hiring and a thousand small roads that made a city ugly. I planted a small community fund. It bought cleaner ovens for bakeries, scrubbers for small factories, and paid for legal help for families who couldn't find clean air.
The board did not like it. My uncle didn't like it at first—he feared the loss of face. But he saw something in the way the neighbor next door could now sleep without cough syrup, and he changed his mind like someone folding paper into a new shape.
"Falcon," he said one night over champagne that burned the back of his throat, "you are making me proud. And nervous."
"Make nervous a smaller word," I said.
He laughed. "Less public mischief then."
"It's not mischief," I told him.
"It looks like mischief," he said.
We argued and laughed and settled into the slow business of doing good with money. But I never let the good funds be a way to buy love. I did those things because I wanted the city to breathe and because I had met someone who had given me a map back to my chest.
Indiana still worked the tea bar. She kept the same cheap ring of keys on the same old cord. When she had extra hours she taught kids to read and made a soup for a neighbor whose lungs still wheezed.
"Move into a better place," I told her once.
"No," she said. "I like this place. It has rhythm."
"Let me fix your roof."
She lifted one eyebrow. "You call that a pickup line?"
"It works sometimes," I said.
It did. I paid for repairs the way I paid for a bad meal: with quiet and a receipt. She accepted the changes like a wary friend. She didn't like trophies.
"You can buy a lot of things," she said. "But don't buy me."
"I never wanted to buy you," I said. "I wanted to be with you."
"That's worse," she said.
• • •
We fought like two people who had never been a pair. She accused me of performative charity, I accused her of anger without a plan. We had a thousand fights that ended like two people at a dock who didn't know how to leave. Then one night she came to my office in the rain and threw a paper at me.
"What's this?" I asked.
"It's your factory plan," she said.
I tore open the paper. It was a map and a list of neighbors. She had circled houses and put check marks by names. She had notes, scrawled in black ink.
"This is—" I began.
"Organized," she said. "Yes. I can keep being against you, but I can also help you fix it. Do you want help or do you want ego?"
I looked at her. In the rain, her hair stuck to her forehead like a bad postcard, and she looked fierce and tired.
"I want both," I said.
She grinned. "That's the worst plan."
"That's my plan," I said.
We became an unlikely team: a billionaire with too many spreadsheets and a tea bar worker with a list and a temper. We went to neighborhood meetings. We visited chemists who knew how to make scrubbers cheap. We hired engineers who had been laughed out of other companies. We paid for retraining and gave loans to small cleaners.
At night, back in my office, I would pin one of her lists to the board like a treasure map. At home, I kept an old purple napkin that she'd used to wipe a cut on her palm during the accident—the one she had kept after the ambulance. I folded it like a flag and kept it on my lamp.
"What's that?" she asked once.
"A map," I said.
"A map to your heart?" she asked.
"I thought it was a napkin when I met you," I admitted. "Now it's a map."
She laughed and smacked my shoulder. "Ridiculous."
"It is," I agreed.
• • •
We were not without enemies.
The plant committee pushed back. They held a meeting and called me naive. Shareholders called me sentimental. A columnist called me a fool playing at philanthropy.
"You're being used," Clancy said once, like someone trying to stop a brush fire.
"Maybe," I said. "But if I burn, I want it to be warm."
He stared like my words were a poor joke. "You can't plan your life like that."
"Maybe not," I said.
But life is stubborn and rarely listens to plans. It listens to choices.
I decided to make one more choice: I would not hide my feelings for Indiana. I would tell her, blunt and precise as a ledger.
We walked the river at night. Neon reflected in small pools. The city had beamed and started to breathe. She told me a story about a small girl she remembered, pale and hungry and with purple lips—an image she had carried. It made my chest ache in a way I could not name then—like a long-lost chord had been plucked.
"I fell for someone at eight," I said. "She had purple lips because she loved pickled cabbage. It was stupid."
"That is not stupid," she said. "That's adorable."
"Because the small things stuck with me," I said. "I like people who are marked by life. It makes them honest to look at."
She looked at me soft, then struck me with a truth like a small fish.
"You only like people because of a mark."
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe I like people who carry their past like a kind of map."
She sighed like a grate opening.
"Say it," she said.
"Say what?"
"Say you like me," she said, and she said it like it was a dare she had already won.
"I like you," I said. "I like you very much."
"Is that a business plan?" she asked.
"It's the best plan I've ever had."
She punched my chest lightly. "Get out," she told me.
"Too late," I said.
• • •
The city changed slowly and sometimes with speed like a storm. The community fund grew. The plant plan changed. We found a new site two towns over with proper buffers and a plan that made sense for engineers. We created clean jobs and a training academy in the neighborhood Indiana fought for. They named a small park after the man who had given a lot and the woman who had argued him into doing it right.
The press called it a miracle; some called it a stunt. The activists called it progress.
"Do people ever stop saying you bought them?" Indiana asked one morning, sipping tea like a weary captain.
"Probably not," I said.
"Then what's the end-game?"
"The end-game is this," I said. "A child who can sleep in a house that smells like jasmine, not smoke. An old man who breathes easier. A city that is not a cough."
"That's boring and noble," she said.
"Then be bored," I said. "Be noble with me."
She smiled like a moon.
• • •
We learned each other's faults too. She hated my arrogance and my habit of thinking money solved everything. I hated her habit of not asking for help when she needed it. We had moments that cracked like thin ice.
Once, at a family dinner at my uncle Emanuel's house, my messy brother—Graham Gustafsson—showed up in his loud shirts and made a show of eating like a man who hadn't had five-course life before.
Graham was messy, bright, and someone both my uncle and I loved in a wounding way.
"How's the fake CEO?" he joked, and everyone laughed except Indiana.
She pounced like a cat. "You're a coward," she said, and then she explained why she thought some companies were monsters.
Graham apologized with an honest face. "I thought I'd test him," he said, and then looked at me like I had just grown a new ear. He liked Indiana.
"She hates a lot of us," I warned him later.
"Then show her you don't," he said. "I will."
He did, in small, clumsy ways. He gave her a book she'd wanted, fixed the little door hinge in her house, and brought his laugh. He became part of the picture like a brown leaf in a painting.
• • •
We had a real moment of reckoning one winter when the cleansers we had installed failed. There was a leak, a smoke alarm, and a bad night for air. The community shouted. Some of the old activists shouted betrayal.
I sat in the front row because I had to. Indiana stood up and described the leak like a sorrow on a map. She was proud and furious and perfect.
"Do you know what it's like to put your hand on a child's chest and feel lungs that can't fill?" she asked. "Do you know what it's like to be the only adult in the room when the sky goes gray?"
I did. I wanted to say I did. I had poured money into swap shops and scrubbers and documentaries. But she had lived it.
"Then make it right," she said to me.
I did. I worked nights and learned. I shook hands with engineers, with the people who had been insulted by my money before. I made sure the systems were fixed. I stood in the rain with wet hair and never gave a speech. I just fixed things like a man who had learned to hold a wrench.
She watched me the way you watch a new shape form in your palm.
"You're messy," she told me once.
"I can be cleaner," I said.
"Don't ever change unless you want to," she said.
• • •
People still called me names. People still said I had saved the city for my own vanity. I didn't care much.
One evening, after a long day, I found Indiana on the roof of her building. The city spilled around us in small lights. She wrapped a blanket around our knees like we were two kids stealing a blanket in winter.
"Do you ever regret it?" she asked.
"Regret what?" I asked.
"All of it. Us. This."
"No," I said. "I regret only that I didn't learn faster."
"That's not a regret," she said. "That's an instruction."
"Then I will follow the instruction," I said.
She leaned her head against my shoulder like a closed book. "Promise me one thing," she said.
"What's that?"
"That you won't let them call you kind only on the front page."
"I won't," I said. "I'll make things kind enough so they can't help but print it."
She laughed like hope in a small room.
• • •
Time made a slow ally. We made a home between a glass tower and an old tea shop. My office kept his view, and her kettle kept its corner. She took to planting a small tree on my balcony. It did not die.
We never stopped fighting or laughing. We found a rhythm. She taught me how to make a proper cup of tea. I taught her the names of numbers that would save a budget.
"You sound happier," she said one morning, when the sun had half the day left.
"I am," I said. "Because I sleep."
She smiled. "Money buys you sleep?"
"No," I said. "Love does."
She sniffed. "Save the lines."
"No," I said. "I mean it. You do that. You put air into a room, and when there's air you can sleep."
• • •
The ending was not a ribbon. There was not a single day in which the world agreed I had done right. There were columns and op-eds and a city that still complained. But there was a man who could breathe easier, and a woman who used to be angry and had become my partner in stubbornness.
One year after the first time she ripped open a shirt in my lobby, I took her back to the place where I had seen that small girl with purple lips when I was eight. The patch of land had become a park, green and tidy, with a small bench and a plaque that read, in small letters, "For the air we share."
"I thought you'd be taller," she said, when we sat down.
"Sorry," I said.
She laughed and leaned on my shoulder like a person who had become home.
"I kept this," she said quietly, pulling something from her pocket.
It was a small square of purple-stained cloth, old and folded. My breath stopped.
"I kept it," she said. "From when you dragged me out like a sack of flour."
"It belonged to you?" I asked.
She nodded. "You never asked for it. I didn't think you'd want it."
"I do," I said. "I wanted it before you knew."
She reached for my hand and pressed the cloth between our fingers. It smelled faintly of old tea and rain.
"This is not just a napkin," she said. "It's proof that when people risk, others sometimes catch."
I put the cloth in my pocket like a relic. "Will you be in my pocket forever?" I asked.
She rolled her eyes. "That is a terrible way to propose."
"I never wanted a proposal to be poetic," I said. "I want it to be obvious."
"Then be obvious," she said.
"Indiana Rice," I said. "Will you—"
She cut me off with a match of her grin and kissed me. "Yes," she said, like a small fire that warmed.
It was not a cliffhanger. It was not a miracle. It was a bench with a plaque and a purple cloth and two people who had chosen to be less alone.
People will always say I bought things. They will say what they want. I learned to live in-between the noise and keep doing the work. I learned that money can be a tool, but not the master.
On the bench, with her hand in mine, I remembered the eight-year-old boy who had once asked the wrong question about food and hunger and had seen a girl with purple lips as something bright and impossible.
"That boy would be happy," I said.
She kissed my temple. "Good. Make him a cup of tea."
"I will," I said.
She smiled like a sunrise. "Make it strong. And don't use lilies."
"Never lilies," I promised.
We left the park that day with a small purple cloth in my pocket, a new plan for clean jobs in our city, and a small, very ordinary, very perfect life.
The End
— Thank you for reading —