Fell For The Wrong Billionaire

Chapter 8: The Boy Without a Face

I couldn't stop looking at it.

I sat with the photograph long after I should have put it away, tracing the edges of that careful, precise hole with my fingertip, like touching it might somehow reveal what had been erased. The little girl's smile stayed the same no matter how long I stared. It was the boy who kept changing — becoming, in my mind, a dozen different faces, none of which I could actually picture, all of which felt somehow wrong.

I studied everything the picture still had to offer. The garden, unfamiliar, roses climbing some kind of trellis behind us. My own scuffed shoes. And his coat — dark, heavy, tailored in a way that seemed strange for a child, with something stitched onto the collar I had to hold the photo up to the lamp to make out properly.

A crest. Small, embroidered, the kind of detail you'd find on private school uniforms or old family emblems, not on any coat a normal child would wear.

I turned the photograph over, hoping for a date, a name, anything written on the back. Nothing. Just blank paper gone soft with age.

I was still staring at it when Kairo came in from splitting wood, stomping snow off his boots, his cheeks red from the cold. I didn't think to hide the photo. I didn't think there was any reason to.

Maybe I should have.

His eyes landed on it from across the room, and everything about him changed at once.

The color drained from his face so fast it startled me. His hands, which had been unwinding his scarf, stopped mid-motion. For one unguarded second, he looked at that photograph, like it shouldn't exist.

"Kairo?"

He didn't answer. He was already moving toward the door, pulling his coat back on with hands that weren't quite steady.

"Kairo, what is wrong? Are you okay?"

"I need some air."

"You just came in from outside."

"I need air, Talia."

"You're scaring me. Just tell me what is wrong."

He stopped at the door, his back to me, one hand braced against the frame like he needed it to stay upright. For a moment I thought he might actually turn around, might finally say something true.

"I can't," he said instead, quiet and rough. "Not right now."

And then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him hard enough to rattle the windows, leaving me standing alone in the kitchen with a photograph in my hand and a hundred new questions where I'd only had a dozen before.

I gave him an hour. A man needed space sometimes, I told myself. Needed to walk off whatever had rattled him. I had no right to chase him down demanding answers he clearly wasn't ready to give.

An hour turned into two. Two turned into three.

By the time the light outside had faded from gray to blue to the deep, starless black of a mountain night, I'd worn a path along the floorboards between the window and the fire, checking the driveway, checking it again, rehearsing what I'd say when he finally walked back through that door. "Where were you? What was that? You don't get to just leave."

By the fourth hour, the rehearsed anger had gone quiet, and something colder had moved in underneath it.

He'd been shot two days ago. Still favored that side when he thought I wasn't watching. And he was out there somewhere in freezing temperatures, in the dark, with men circling this cabin who left playing cards with hand-drawn mountains as a warning.

I stood at the window with my arms wrapped around myself and made myself admit the thing I'd been avoiding since the door slammed shut behind him.

I wasn't angry that he'd left.

I was terrified something had happened to him.

I sat down hard on the arm of the couch, my legs unsteady under me for no reason I could point to. Three days. I'd known this man three days, most of which he'd spent bleeding or lying to me or both, and somehow, without my noticing it happening, he'd become someone whose absence felt like a hole in the room.

I grabbed my coat before I'd fully decided to, pulling on boots, shoving a flashlight into my pocket alongside a decision I knew, even as I made it, wasn't smart.

'This is reckless', the sane part of my brain told me, the part that sounded increasingly like Mara. 'You don't know what's out there. You don't even know what he is.'

I went anyway.

The cold hit hard the second I stepped outside, sharper than it had any right to be this late in the evening. I followed the only tracks I could find leading away from the cabin — his boot prints, which was half filled with fresh snow but still visible, cutting a determined line toward the tree line and beyond.

"Kairo?" My voice sounded small against the vast, silent dark of the forest.

Nothing answered but the wind moving through the pines, a low, constant hush that made the silence feel worse rather than better.

I kept walking, the beam of my flashlight jumping over snow-heavy branches. 'I'd turn back if I didn't find something soon.' I thought to myself. I kept walking anyway.

The tracks led me further than I expected, winding between the trees in a path that didn't look aimless — not the wandering of a man walking off his anger, but something more deliberate, like he'd been heading somewhere specific.

I was starting to lose feeling in my fingers when the beam of my flashlight caught something dark against the white ground ahead.

I stopped walking.

Blood.

Fresh blood.

Dark red against the snow, spattered in a pattern that wasn't a single drop, wasn't the kind of thing that came from a nosebleed or a scraped hand — a scatter, wide and unmistakable, soaking down into the white in a way that told me whoever had bled here had been standing, moving, maybe fighting, only minutes before I arrived.

"Kairo?" My voice cracked, void of all pretense of composure "Kairo!"

Nothing answered. Just the wind, and the trees, and the blood in the snow spreading slowly at my feet like it was still warm enough to melt through.