Fell For The Wrong Billionaire

Chapter 3: A Stranger Under My Roof

The drive back was a blur, snow slamming sideways into the windshield, my knuckles aching around the wheel for hours afterward. The gunshots behind me had stopped. I wanted that to mean something good. Silence just meant I'd lost track of where the danger actually was.

I kept glancing sideways at him. Slumped against the door, head lolling with every turn I took too fast, blood soaking dark through the jacket I'd pressed against his side at the last stop sign. His breathing had gone shallow and quick, small clouds of fog appearing and vanishing too fast against the cold glass.

"Stay with me." I said it more times than I could count, my voice cracking somewhere in the middle and never quite recovering. "We're almost there."

He was a stranger. I'd known him twenty minutes, most of which he'd spent unconscious. But that one broken word in the snow, ‘please’ had lodged itself under my ribs and refused to let go.

When the cabin rose out of the storm, porch light glowing gold against all that white, my chest cracked open with something that almost hurt worse than the fear had.

Getting him inside nearly finished what the cold had started on both of us. I hooked his arm over my shoulders and half-walked, half-dragged him up the porch steps while the wind tried to knock us flat. By the time I got him onto the couch, my arms were shaking too badly to feel my own hands, sweat turning to ice against my skin the second I stopped moving.

I stood over him, chest heaving, staring down at a stranger bleeding into Mara's couch cushions, and had to grip the back of it to stay upright.

‘Call an ambulance.’ The sane part of my brain, which sounded uncomfortably like Mara, was already shouting. ‘This isn't yours to fix.’

My thumb hovered over the screen. Then his voice came back to me, wrecked and desperate in the snow. ‘Don't call the police.’

I lowered the phone and walked to the window instead. Pulled back the curtain, half braced for headlights climbing my driveway.

What I saw was worse, in its own quiet way. Tire tracks. Fresh, cutting through the snow at the bottom of my drive and stopping abruptly just before the tree line, like whoever made them had thought better of coming closer.

Or like they hadn't needed to.

Someone had followed us. Or found us. Either way, someone out there now knew exactly where I lived.

I let the curtain fall and stepped back from the glass. I didn't call anyone. I didn't have time to decide whether that made me brave or unbelievably foolish.

He needed help. Now.

Mara had kept a full medical kit in the hall closet. Bandages. Antiseptic. Suture supplies she'd shown me once, years ago, saying only just in case. I'd never imagined in case would look like this.

I cut his shirt away with kitchen scissors, grateful for something to do with my shaking hands, and made myself look at the wound instead of the man it belonged to. Not as bad as I'd feared. The bullet had passed clean through, but still bleeding freely, and I still had no real idea what I was doing.

My hands kept trembling through the gauze. "You can do this."

He didn't move. I kept checking his chest, watching it rise and fall, my own breath catching every time it seemed to pause a fraction too long.

I was wrapping the last of the bandage when his hand shot up and closed around my wrist.

My hands stopped mid-motion, gauze still pinched between my fingers. His eyes were open, barely, glassy with pain, but fixed on me.

"You're awake."

He didn't answer that. He made no sound. Not one groan. He just breathed through it, slow and even, like pain was something he'd trained himself to survive without ever letting it show.

That silence frightened me more than the gunshots had.

"Did anyone see you bring me here?"

Seriously?

Not where am I. Not what happened. Not even thank you.

"No," I answered carefully. "No one saw us."

His whole body loosened at that. Eyes closed. The breath he let out came so long and so full that I found myself holding my own until his finished.

"Are you sure?" His eyes opened again, sharper now.

"I'm sure." The words came out a bit slower than they should have. "You should be asking whether I saw anyone. Not the other way around."

He didn't answer. Just watched me — a long, unreadable look, like he was cataloging every detail of my face, my kitchen, my life.

"My name is Kairo."

Just that. No last name.

"Talia," I said, a half-second slower than I meant to.

He held my name a moment before nodding, slow, like he was filing it away somewhere he intended to keep it.

He asked more questions after that. None of them the ones I'd expected from a man who'd just been shot.

"How many neighbors do you have?"

"None close. Nearest house is four miles down the mountain."

"Does anyone check on you? Family. Friends.”

"No. Not really."

"Cameras. On the property, the road in?"

"No cameras." I set the antiseptic down harder than I needed to. "Why does any of that matter? You're the one who got shot."

"Has anyone contacted you recently?" He pressed on like he hadn't heard me. "Called. Messaged?”

"Kairo. What's going on?"

He didn't answer. He looked at the fire instead of at me, like the answer was easier to give to something that couldn't look back.

None of his questions had been about him.

I realized.

Every single one had been about me.

He wasn't afraid of being found. He was afraid of what would happen to me if he was.

I got up to get him water, mostly to put a few feet of air between us. When I came back, his eyes had drifted past me.

To the kitchen table. To the brass key still sitting exactly where I'd left it that morning.

For one exposed second he stopped breathing entirely, like he was staring at something he'd buried a long time ago.

Then it was gone, wiped clean so fast I might have convinced myself I'd imagined it.

"Where did you get that?" His voice had changed. Careful. Too careful.

"It was my guardian's." I studied his face. "She died a few weeks ago. Left it to me. Why?"

"No reason." He looked away, toward the fire, and didn't say anything else.

He was lying. I didn't push. Some part of me was afraid of the answer — afraid of what it would mean if a brass key and a bleeding stranger and twenty years of half-remembered nightmares were threads of the same tangled truth.

I got him settled on the couch for the night, checked the bandage one last time, and told myself I'd get answers in the morning.

I didn't sleep. Not really. I lay listening to the wind clawing at the eaves, the fire settling and popping in the front room, the strange comfort of another heartbeat somewhere under my roof — and hating myself a little for finding it a comfort at all.

It must have been close to two in the morning when something pulled me fully awake. The cabin was silent.

Too silent.

I moved down the hall, my heart climbing before I'd even reached the front room.

The couch was empty. Blankets thrown back. No sign of him anywhere.

I was at the window before I'd decided to move.

I found him outside.

Standing in the snow beyond the porch, barefoot, wound barely dressed, the cold that should have dropped him to his knees not touching him at all. His silhouette stood dark and unnervingly still against the pale stretch of white leading to the trees.

He wasn't swaying. Wasn't struggling to stay upright.

He was... waiting. Every line of his body coiled, like he'd done this before.

In his hand, held level and rock-steady, was a gun.

Pointed at the tree line.

I pressed my palm flat against the cold glass. The question tearing through me wasn't who is he running from.

It was what exactly he was — that he could stand like that, after everything, like the man on the other end of that trigger should be the one who's afraid.