The Billionaire I Was Meant To Hate

Chapter 6: What They Left Behind

POV: Aria

For three seconds, the only sound in the house was my own pulse.

Then my father's hand found my arm in the dark, steady despite everything, and pulled me back against the wall of

the hallway.

"Stairs,

" he whispered.

"Don't move toward the stairs."

Downstairs, something scraped against the hardwood — a chair, or a shelf, dragged a few inches and stopped.

Then footsteps, unhurried in a way that scared me more than if they'd been running. Whoever was down there wasn't

panicking. They knew exactly how much time they had.

My mother's voice carried up faintly from the kitchen extension. She'd gotten to a phone somehow, in the dark, and

I heard the tight, controlled way she gave our address to a 911 dispatcher, like she'd rehearsed for this exact moment

even though none of us ever had.

The footsteps stopped.

A door — the side entrance off the study, the one that led out toward the garden — opened and shut hard enough

to rattle the frame.

By the time the lights flickered back on, whoever had been in the house was gone.

---

The responding officers walked the property twice. No forced entry at the front or back door — whoever it was had

come in through the garden gate, left unlocked more out of habit than carelessness, the way you leave things unlocked

in a neighborhood where nothing has ever happened.

Nothing had ever happened here. Not until five years ago, when it started happening to this family one piece at a

time.

"Anything missing?" the older officer asked, notepad open.

My father did a slow circuit of his study while my mother stood in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself. The

box of old papers he'd been going through when I arrived that morning — the one he'd frozen over the moment I

mentioned Blackwood Holdings — was gone.

Not knocked over. Not rifled through and abandoned. Gone.

"That box,

" my father said quietly.

"It was right here.

"What was in it?"

He hesitated long enough that I answered for him.

Technologies."

"Old business records. From Bennett

The officer wrote that down without any particular urgency. To him, this looked like an ordinary burglary — the kind

of thing that happens to nice houses in nice neighborhoods sometimes. He had no way of knowing about the shell

company, the forged signature, the unfinished note still folded in my bag.

I wasn't going to be the one to tell him. Not yet. Not until I understood what my father needed to be protected from

once I did.

He didn't say another word about the deal that night. Every time I tried to bring the conversation back to the

sentence he'd been about to finish —

I thought I could trust him

— his eyes went somewhere I couldn't follow, and my mother found a reason to steer us elsewhere.

It was nearly midnight before I finally drove home, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

---

Across town, in a house I would not have been able to find on a map, a man who had spent most of his adult life

avoiding the subject of Bennett Technologies hung up a phone call he hadn't wanted to take.

His son watched him from the doorway, arms crossed, the easy expression he usually wore nowhere in sight.

"That was about the break-in,

" the son said. It wasn't a question.

"It's nothing that concerns you."

"You said Bennett.

" He stepped further into the room.

"I heard you say it. Twice."

His father busied himself with the drink he'd poured before the phone rang, refusing to meet his son's eyes in the way

he always did when a conversation had gotten somewhere he didn't intend to let it go.

"Dad.

" The son's voice had lost all its usual charm.

"Who is she?"

His father set the glass down without drinking from it."Someone, " he said finally,

"who was never supposed to start asking questions."

He didn't explain what he meant. He didn't have to — not to his son, who had spent years learning exactly which

silences in this house meant drop it and exactly which ones meant something worse was still coming.

For the first time in a long time, his son didn't drop it.

"Then maybe,

" he said quietly,

"it's time somebody finally answered them."