Me and My Billionaire Duke

RUN

CHAPTER THREE

Jerome didn't reply to my message.

That wasn't unusual. He was bad with his phone. Always had been, always would be, one of those small things I had filed under quirks and never looked at too closely.

I told myself that in the cab.

I told myself that right up until I turned onto his street and saw that the lights in his apartment were on.

He was home.

He just hadn't replied.

I slowed my walk without meaning to.

Sophie's voice came back to me. That careful, selected silence she always produced when Jerome came up. The thing she never said out loud. I had never pushed her on it.

I had never wanted to know badly enough to ask directly because asking directly meant getting an answer and some answers change things permanently.

I pushed the thought away.

I was tired.

It had been the longest day of my professional life and I was reading into nothing because I was exhausted and unsettled and a man I barely knew had looked at me this afternoon and asked me to marry him like I was something he had simply decided to acquire.

Jerome's building door was open the way it always was. I went in. Took the stairs. Walked the corridor.

His door was not fully closed.

A strip of warm light fell across the hallway floor. Voices inside, low, overlapping, and definitely more than one. I raised my hand to knock.

Then I heard her laugh.

It was a particular kind of laugh. Soft and private and not meant for anyone outside the room. The kind of laugh that exists in a specific kind of moment between a specific kind of people.

My hand stayed in the air.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the laugh to fade. Long enough for Jerome's voice to say something low and close that I couldn't make out.

Long enough for the silence that followed to tell me everything the laugh had started to say

I pushed the door open.

Just slightly. Just enough.

Jerome was standing near the kitchen counter. His back was mostly to me. His hand was on the waist of a woman I had never seen before, fingers spread, familiar and comfortable.

Almost like the touch of someone who had done this many times.

She turned her face up toward his and he kissed her and I stood in the doorway with my hand on the door and felt something in my chest go very, very quiet.

I should have left. I know that now. I should have turned around and walked back down that corridor and taken the stairs and gone home and called Sophie and let her say all the things she had been carefully not saying for however long she had known.

I couldn't believe that the man I had considered to be my boyfriend could cheat on me.

No wonder he hadn't responded to my calls and texts. He was having too much fun to even remember he had another girlfriend.

I should have left.

Instead I stepped back. Pressed myself against the wall beside the door. And in doing so I saw the rest of the room.

My brain took it in slowly. In pieces. Like it was rationing the information because it knew I could only absorb so much at once.

The table. The things on it..

I recognized some of them and wished immediately that I didn't.

Packages.

Stacks of something bound tightly.

The unmistakable shape of weapons laid out with a kind of terrible organization, like inventory. Like this was simply work.

Simply business.

Three other men I had never seen. Standing around the edges of the room with the casual ease of people who were exactly where they were supposed to be.

And on the floor, I saw a man. With bound wrists, and his head down. His whole body folded into itself the way bodies do when they have been in one position for too long and have run out of the energy to fight it. He was saying something. I had to focus to hear it over the blood that had started rushing in my ears.

"Please."

His voice was barely there.

Scraped raw. "I won't— I swear I won't. It was a mistake. I swear to God it was a mistake. Please. I have — I have children. Please."

Nobody in the room looked at him.

Jerome had stepped back from the woman. He was looking at one of the other men now, a man I didn't recognize, standing slightly apart from the others, with the particular stillness of someone who never needed to move quickly because things always went the way he intended them to go.

He was well dressed. Composed. The kind of composure that had nothing to do with calm and everything to do with the complete absence of conscience.

The man on the floor said please one more time.

The well dressed man looked down at him. Something almost like consideration crossed his face. Then he did what he did all I can say is that it was quick and it was final and the man on the floor stopped speaking.

Nobody flinched.

Not Jerome. Not the woman. Not one person in that room moved or reacted or looked away. Like this was simply something that happened.

Like it was simply part of the evening.

I made a sound.

I don't know what kind. Something small and involuntary that escaped before I could stop it. The murderer looked up first, his eyes going straight to the door, straight to the gap, straight to the exact place where I was pressed against the wall outside it.

Our eyes clashed for a millisecond and the terror in me ran through every inch of my body like electrical current.

I wondered what would've happened to me if I had been caught witnessing everything I saw today.

I might have ended up like the man that was murdered in cold blood.

I didn't wait to find out.

I ran.

Down the corridor, not looking back, not thinking, just bolting down the stairs, a blur beneath me, the building door crashing open, the night air hitting me like something physical.

I ran until my lungs made me stop and then I walked fast, very fast, because stopping completely felt like dying and I wasn't ready to stop completely yet.

My phone was in my hand. I didn't call Sophie. I didn't call my mother. I didn't call anyone I loved because I had just watched a man die on a floor and the person— the alleged love of my life had not flinched and I did not know who was watching and I did not know anything except one thing.

One thing very clearly.

I couldn't show up like this at my mom's door tonight, not even my apartment. Mom and Sophie would know something was wrong.

I had been made.

I needed protection.

I needed someone powerful.

I needed someone whose name alone was enough to make other powerful people hesitate. I needed walls around me that were built from something stronger than an apartment door and a good intentions.

I knew exactly one person who had that. I knew exactly who to meet.

I took a short bus ride to the building. I had run halfway towards it.

He was still in his office.

It was past nine and the building was mostly dark and he was still behind his desk in the same suit, the city spread out black and glittering behind him, like he had simply never left. He looked up when I walked in and something shifted in his expression — not concern exactly. More like recognition. Like he had been waiting for something and it had arrived in a form that didn't surprise him.

He didn't ask what happened. He just looked at me ..really looked, the way he did everything, completely and waited.

I stood there . I pressed my hands flat against my laps to stop them moving.

"I saw something tonight"

I said.

"Something I wasn't supposed to see. And the person who—"

I stopped. Breath shaky, eyes glossy.

"There are people who know I saw it. And I don't—"

I stopped again. Steadied myself.

"I need to not be alone right now. I need to be somewhere that—"

I looked at him. "I need your name around me like a wall. That's the only way I know how to say it."

Mr Leo looked at me for a long moment.

"And the offer?"

he asked quietly "From this afternoon."

I held his gaze.

"Yes," I said.

"If it still stands."

I answered without thinking.

I was too stunned to speak.

It was almost like I was in shock after the traumatic experience I had encountered

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he reached into the drawer of his desk and placed a document on the surface between us. Slid it toward me along with a pen.

I looked at it. At my name already printed on the line at the bottom. At his beside it.

"There are things I haven't told you,"

he said.

"And things you haven't told me."

He said it simply. Without accusation.

"I imagine that will remain true for some time."

I had a feeling he had an idea of what I may have seen. I honestly couldn't tell.

I just wanted to protect my self and my family because he saw me. The well dressed murderer saw me.

And how else could I do that but by signing a contract with the most protected man in the city.

I picked up the pen.

"I imagine so,"

I said flatly

I signed my name.

He signed his.

And just like that … on a Tuesday evening in a dark office above the city lights, I became the future wife of a man I knew nothing about for reasons I could not fully explain, in a world I did not yet understand.

I put the pen down.

Outside the windows the city glittered on, completely indifferent.

“I'll call the priest and two witnesses to make it official tomorrow”

He announced with indifference

“Tomorrow!??”

I shouted. I expected changes but not that fast.