THE BILLIONARIA’S DANGEROUS DEAL

Chapter 2

XAVIER POV

“Do you remember this?”

I placed the photograph on the table between us. Vanessa picked it up and stared at it. Her eyes moved over the picture slowly. Then she shook her head.

“No,” she said finally, and set it down. “I don't — I'm sorry, Xavier.

My jaw tightened. It was another memory she had lost. The doctors had warned me that the accident had affected her memory.

She remembered me, that was the strange part. My voice, my face and our relationship. But almost everything outside of me existed in fragments—places, people, moments that should have meant something to her but didn’t.

So I did everything I could to help her remember.

I took her back to the places we once shared, showed her old photographs, played the songs she loved, and told her stories about us.

Most days, she remembered nothing.

Then, one afternoon, she stared at an old photograph and suddenly smiled.

“I remember this place.” My heart stopped.

“The lake,” she whispered, staring at the photograph. “We used to come here together.”

“You remembered?”

She nodded, still staring at the picture. “There was a dock… I remember sitting there with you.”

“There was,” I said quietly.

For a moment, she looked almost frightened. Her fingers tightened around the photograph as if she couldn’t believe the memory had come back to her.

I told myself, that night and every night after, that I would rebuild whatever the accident had taken from her, piece by piece, for as long as it took. Even if it meant starting all over again.

Samantha pov

I had no choice but to accept Vanessa moving into my room with Xavier. She had completely taken over his attention, while I had learned to keep my distance. We barely spoke unless it was necessary. So I focus on what matters, my routine, my responsibilities and my rose garden.

Especially my rose garden.

It was the only place that was still mine. Every morning I water it before starting my chores in the mansion.

The days slowly passed with me trying to make myself invisible while pretending his distance didn’t hurt.

That afternoon, Xavier sent me to his study to retrieve a blue folder from his desk. He was expecting it for a meeting and apparently couldn’t be bothered to get it himself.

I walked upstairs and entered the study. The study smelled like him even when he wasn't in it. I crossed to the desk and immediately spotted the blue folder, exactly where he'd said it would be. I reached for it and as I lifted it, a framed photograph slipped from the desk and hit the floor.

"Oh..."

I quickly bent to pick it up.

It was a picture of Xavier with his parents and grandmother taken years ago. As I lifted the frame, something small slid from behind it.

A black flash drive.

I frowned.

Why would anyone hide a flash drive behind a family photograph?

I turned it over in my palm, and every instinct I had told me to put it back exactly where I'd found it and forget I'd ever seen it. I have never once in my life been good at listening to that instinct.

I scanned the room and luckily spotted a laptop sitting on the desk. It had no password— careless of him. Xavier had seized my own laptop, leaving me with no other choice but to use this.

I slipped the flash drive into the USB port. A folder popped up on the screen, containing a single video file. I clicked on it, the video loaded and my entire body froze when a familiar face appeared on the screen.

Victor, my foster father. The man everyone believed was a murderer.

I watched the footage again, hardly breathing, following every second of it.

Inside was video evidence from a Cole-affiliated operation showing a worker collapsing and being dragged, toward somewhere out of frame. And at the edge of the shot, unmistakably, Victor — pointing at his own phone, clearly trying to document what he was seeing.

Victor had not been a murderer.

He had been the person who tried to reveal the crime, and the Cole family had destroyed his life to protect their empire.

My hands were shaking hard enough by the time the footage ended that I nearly dropped the drive a second time. Every instinct told me to march downstairs right then and put it in front of Xavier's face, to make him explain how his family's name had ended up covering something this ugly. I wanted to demand answers but if I revealed the flash drive now, the Cole family would destroy the evidence before it ever reached the world.

So I said nothing and slid the drive into the inside pocket of my cardigan, picked up the folder Xavier had actually sent me for, and walked out of that study looking, like nothing at all had happened.

I had barely reached the hallway when Vanessa’s voice stopped me.

“Samantha.”I turned.

She stood near the staircase, wearing one of her expensive silk dresses, her expression soft and almost friendly.

“Yes?”

Her eyes dropped once, deliberately, to the folder in my hands, then back to my face.

“Xavier sent you up?”

“He did.”

A small smile touched the corner of her mouth.

“How convenient.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.”

She was already moving past me, silk brushing my sleeve, going down the hall before I could ask what exactly she thought I'd done.

An hour later, the mansion erupted into chaos.

“Miss Vanessa collapsed!”

The scream came from one of the maids. Everyone rushed toward Vanessa’s room.

I followed behind them, confused.

Vanessa laid out pale and trembling against her pillows, Xavier already gripping her hand with fear on his face.

“What happened?” His voice cracked on the second word.The maid was shaking so hard the words barely made it out.

“She drank the tea — the tea Samantha brought up.”

“I didn't bring her anything.”

Nobody so much as glanced my way. I might as well have been speaking a different language.

The doctor arrived within minutes and I watched Xavier's face change while the man examined her.

“She's been poisoned.”

The room went so quiet I could hear my own pulse.

“What?” Xavier's voice dropped ten degrees.

My eyes found Vanessa's across the room. She looked frightened, fragile, perfectly cast for the part — and underneath all of it, so quick I nearly convinced myself I'd imagined it, the smallest flash of satisfaction crossed her face and was gone.

“Search her room,” Xavier said. He didn't even look at me when he gave the order. The guard returned within minutes holding a small brown bottle between two fingers,

“Where did you find that?”

“In Mrs Samantha's room, sir.”

My eyes widened in shock when I realized what was happening. I was being framed.

I then stared at the bottle.

Xavier, “no.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted it to.

“This is a setup.” The words left my mouth quietly.

I looked at Xavier and waited for him to say something.

Anything, he knew me. He knew I had no reason to hurt Vanessa. But the look in his eyes was colder than anything I had ever seen.

“Samantha,” he said quietly. “Tell me the truth.”

“I didn’t poison her.”

“Then why was the poison found in your room?”

I stood there frozen, every instinct in my body screams I should defend myself, it won't matter now, not when his first love is lying down in pain. I tried saying something but couldn't find the right words to say to Xavier that would make him believe me.

“Xavier, please, I don't want her punished,” Vanessa murmured, reaching weakly for his hand, her voice trembling in a way that would have moved me if I hadn't just watched her satisfaction flicker and vanished.

“Maybe she didn't mean it.”

“From today,” Xavier said, not looking at me.

“you'll nurse her until she's fully recovered.”

“Xavier. You don't mean that.”

A bottle of poison in your room, and my fiancée is lying in that bed because of you.”

“Your fiancée.” The word tore out of me before I could stop it.

“I'm your wife, Xavier.”

His jaw tightened. He didn't correct himself, he didn't have to because his silence had corrected me instead.

Now get out of my sight before I call the police myself.

I flinched like he'd struck me, and left the room with my whole body shaking, and I didn't stop crying until there was simply nothing left in me to cry with.