Fell For The Wrong Billionaire

Chapter 4: The Man Who Doesn't Sleep

I stood at the window watching him watch the trees, my breath fogging the glass.

He didn't move for a long time. He just stood there with the gun raised, every line of his body coiled and still, like the cold had no claim on him at all. The wind pulled at his hair, at the loose gauze wrapped around his side, and he didn't so much as shiver. I did — standing safely inside, wrapped in a robe, I shivered enough for both of us.

Then his arm lowered.

He scanned the tree line once more before turning back toward the porch, favoring his wounded side just enough to remind me he wasn't actually made of something harder than the rest of us. Just very, very good at pretending.

I met him at the door and didn't move out of the way, close enough that the cold coming off his skin reached me before he did.

"Barefoot. With a gun. In the snow." My voice shook on the last word. "What was that."

"An animal." He didn't step back. Didn't step around me either — just stood, like he expected me to move first. "Thought I heard something in the trees."

"An animal." I shut the door hard enough that the frame rattled, close enough now that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his eyes. "You pulled a gun on an animal."

"Better safe."

"Better safe?" My voice climbed. I stepped closer without deciding to, close enough to see the blood still crusted along his collar. "I stitched you up on my couch four hours ago. I think that buys me more than two words."

He stopped. Something moved behind his eyes — not really guilt, something that cost him more to let show.

"You have," he said quietly. "I know you have."

"Then talk to me."

"I can't." He rubbed a hand across his jaw, and for a second he looked less dangerous than simply worn down. "There are things about me that don't have easy answers. Not tonight. Maybe not for a while."

"That's not an answer either."

"No," he admitted. “Somethings that cannot just be said.”

I didn't actually feel the refusal, but the way he said it, quiet, like it cost him something to hand over even that much. He hadn't looked away once. Neither had I, until my eyes started to sting from not blinking and I broke first.

I turned off the lamp and left him in the dark, telling myself I'd get real answers in the morning.

I woke to the sound of a hammer.

I pulled back the curtain and found Kairo kneeling on my porch steps in the gray early light, driving a nail into the board that had been loose and warped since before Mara died, wearing yesterday's torn, bloodstained shirt like changing it hadn't once crossed his mind.

I threw on a sweater and ran out before he could tear his stitches open. The job was already half finished. The wood fit seamless. The nails sat clean and true, better than the handyman I'd paid last spring had managed in an entire afternoon.

"You shouldn't be out here. You've not fully recovered."

"It needed fixing." He didn't look up, testing the step under his weight.

"Is that the case?"

He looked up then, and there was something almost boyish in it. "I couldn't sleep. Figured I'd be useful instead of lying there staring at your ceiling."

I opened my mouth to argue and then heard it — a low, steady hum from the side of the cabin that hadn't been there in weeks.

The generator.

"You fixed that too? It's been dead since March."

"Corroded connection. Wasn't hard."

He said it like it was nothing, and I stood there on my newly repaired steps trying to reconcile the man in front of me with the one who'd stood in my snow-covered yard twelve hours earlier, gun raised.

None of it fit together into anyone I recognized.

The contradictions only piled higher as the day wore on.

I watched him in the workshop that afternoon, handling my table saw when I asked if he wanted to help cut a bracket. The way he held the tool told me more than his silence ever would. Careful. Precise. More like someone who'd grown up around things too expensive to be careless with.

Later, cleaning up after his dressing change, I found the bandages he'd folded that morning stacked neatly on the counter — tight, uniform, corners crisp enough to belong in a field hospital.

"Where did you learn to fold gauze like that?"

"Picked it up somewhere."

"Somewhere," I repeated, letting the word sit heavy between us.

"Somewhere," he said again, flatter this time.

I pushed anyway. "You keep saying that. Somewhere. Picked it up. No reason. Do you actually plan on telling me anything true, or is that just how this works now?"

His eyes met mine, and for a second something raw flickered there. "There are things I just can't tell you Talia, even if I wanted to."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed quietly. "It isn't."

He turned away before I could push further. I stood there hating how much I believed him without a single real answer to hold onto.

It happened again an hour later, when he crossed to my old side door and, without me asking, disarmed the ancient keypad alarm Mara had installed decades ago — one I hadn't used or thought about in years — in under ten seconds. Fingers moving over the panel with the ease of a man checking his own watch.

"How did you know how to do that?"

"Lucky guess."

"Doesn't look like a guess to me, Kairo."

He didn't answer. He just looked at me for some seconds, then went back to whatever he'd been doing.

I was starting to understand something about him. Whoever, or whatever, had trained this man hadn't taught him small things. Small things didn't teach you to move like this — efficient, contained, half-alert even at rest, like some part of him had never once believed a locked door meant safe.

Whoever was hunting him wasn't the kind of trouble you called the police about.

They were the kind the police couldn't touch at all.

It was late afternoon when I sat beside him to change his dressing again, the light through the window gone soft and gold, the fire crackling low. He'd been cooperative the way he always did for this, letting me work in silence.

I reached to smooth the fresh bandage into place, and my palm brushed his shoulder — barely anything, an accident, skin against the warm line of his collarbone for less than a second.

His breath caught, audible in the quiet room. Not a flinch — something quieter and stranger, like my hand had short-circuited something in him he had no language for. His eyes found mine, and for one heartbeat I watched something move behind them that looked dangerously close to want.

Neither of us moved.

The fire popped somewhere behind me. I was aware of everything — the warmth radiating off his skin, the unsteady rhythm of his breathing, the careful inch of space between my hand and his shoulder that neither of us closed and neither of us widened.

"Sorry," I whispered, though I didn't move my hand.

"Don't be." His voice had gone low, rough at the edges, barely more than breath.

Still, neither of us moved.

It was Kairo who finally looked away first, some wall sliding quietly back into place behind his eyes — but not before I'd seen it. Not before I understood that whatever had just passed between us wasn't only fear, and it wasn't only his.

I finished wrapping the bandage slower than I needed to. Neither of us said anything else. We didn't have to.

I saw a black SUV a little after four.

I'd gone out to the truck for the toolbox I'd left in the bed, and something made me glance down toward the road. The SUV sat parked at the end of the drive, engine idling, exhaust curling pale against the cold.

I stood there with the toolbox in my hands, watching it. It didn't move. Neither did it turn up toward the cabin. It just sat there, patient, like it was waiting for something, or watching for it.

Then, as quickly as I'd noticed it, it pulled away and vanished around the bend.

I didn't tell Kairo. Maybe because I didn't want to watch him go still and lethal again, pacing the windows with that terrible, practiced calm. The truth was smaller. I wanted one more hour of pretending this was just a quiet afternoon. A man healing. A fire in the hearth. Nothing more sinister than that.

It didn't last.

By evening, exhaustion had finally caught up with him. I found him asleep on the couch as the light outside faded to blue, his face slack in a way it never was awake — the tight, guarded lines around his eyes gone, just for a while.

I was reaching for the blanket to cover him when he stirred, murmuring something too low to catch. I leaned in without meaning to.

"I promised," he mumbled, brow furrowing like whatever he was dreaming had teeth. "I promised I'd keep you safe."

I stood there, blanket half-raised, watching his face for some sign of who ‘you’ belonged to in his dream. Maybe a sister or a mother. Someone this whole nightmare had already cost him.

It never once occurred to me the word might mean me.

I laid the blanket over him and moved away.

I was halfway back to the kitchen when every light in the cabin died at once.

The refrigerator's hum cut off mid-note. The lamp in the corner vanished. Darkness dropped over the whole cabin so fast and so complete that I stopped mid-step, my pulse loud in the sudden silence pressing in from every side.

For one breath, I thought of the generator he'd fixed that morning, running fine as far as I knew.

Then I heard him move behind me in the dark — fast, silent, already on his feet, already alert in a way that told me he'd never really been asleep at all, not fully, not ever.

"That's doesn't seem like a blown fuse." His voice came low, flat, lethal-calm.

I could hear him crossing the room without seeing him — the soft, precise sound of a drawer sliding open, metal against metal.

"Kairo." My own voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "What's happening?"

He didn't answer right away. When he finally spoke, it wasn't to me at all — some words, dropped so quiet I almost missed them.

"Not yet. Please, not yet.”