Trapped In The Billionaire’s Name

CHAPTER 34

Reina's POV

The hearing date came through Thursday.

Eighteen days. Judge Mercer, courtroom four, ten in the morning. Lena forwarded the notice with a single line beneath it — “We're ready. This is the end of it.”

I read it on my break sitting in the stairwell where I went when I needed thirty seconds of genuine quiet. Eighteen days. I'd been carrying the specific weight of this for so long that the number felt both too close and already overdue.

I texted Damian. *Got the notice.*

*Me too. How are you feeling?*

I thought about it honestly. *Like someone told me a storm has an end date. Relieved and not quite believing it yet.*

*That's accurate,* he sent back. *Both things at once.*

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”Then after a pause: “Have dinner with me tonight. Not about any of this. Just dinner.”

I looked at that for a moment. We'd had dinners that started as just dinner and became about Celeste and the case because the case had been the shape of everything. The deliberate request to keep it separate felt like a small act of reclamation.

“Yes,” I sent. “Somewhere new.”

“ I know a place.”

He took me to a Japanese restaurant in the West Village that seated twelve people and had no sign on the door. The kind of place that existed entirely by word of mouth and charged accordingly and was worth every dollar because the food was extraordinary and the room asked nothing of you except to be present.

We sat at the counter. Close. The chef worked in front of us and the meal was a procession of small courses that arrived without being ordered and required nothing except attention.

"How did you find this?" I said.

"Julian. He has excellent taste in restaurants and terrible taste in almost everything else."

"That's not true. He suspected Celeste early."

"One exception," he said.

I looked at the counter. The next course arrived — something delicate and precise that I didn't have a name for. I ate it slowly. "Did you tell him? About the hearing date?"

"This afternoon. He said it's about time and that he wants to be there."

"In the courtroom?"

"Outside it. He said he doesn't need to be inside, he just wants to be in the building when it closes." A pause. "Helena said the same thing."

Something moved through me. The picture of all of them — Julian outside a courtroom, Helena with her folder of documents that had started all of this, Lena already preparing for the next phase — all of it converging on eighteen days.

"Marco wants to come," I said.

"I know. He texted me."

I looked at him. "He texted you."

"He said, and I'm quoting, 'what time is the thing and where do I park.' " Damian's expression was perfectly level. "I sent him the address and told him parking was his problem."

"That's the correct response," I said.

"I thought so."

We ate in comfortable quiet for a moment. The chef presented something new. I watched Damian's face when he tasted it — the brief unguarded pleasure of someone who hadn't expected to be surprised and was.

I liked watching him experience things. That had snuck up on me gradually — the specific interest in his reactions, in what reached him and what didn't. Most people I observed clinically, the way you did with patients. With him it was different. It was personal.

"Tell me about when you were fourteen," I said.

He looked at me. "When Celeste came."

"Yes. You don't have to."

"No," he said. "It's alright." He looked at the counter. "My father remarried fourteen months after my mother died. I thought it was too fast and I said so and he told me that grief didn't have a schedule and she made him feel like the future was still possible." He paused. "I understood that later. At fourteen I just felt replaced."

"That's what you were supposed to feel at fourteen," I said.

"Yes. But I handled it by becoming very self-sufficient very quickly. I decided I didn't need anything from anyone I couldn't provide myself." He looked at me. "Celeste encouraged that. Which I understand now was intentional. A self-sufficient stepson who didn't ask questions was a useful thing for her."

"She shaped you," I said. Not an accusation. Just accuracy.

"She tried to," he said. "I think the version of me she shaped is the one who showed up at your door expecting manipulation and got divorce papers and a morning shift instead." He looked at me with that steady warmth. "You broke the model in the first thirty seconds."

"I just didn't have time for a performance," I said.

"I know. That's what broke it." He turned on the stool slightly so he was facing me more directly. "You've never once treated me like a position or a resource. Do you know how rare that is in my specific life?"

"It shouldn't be rare," I said.

"No," he agreed. "It shouldn't."

The last course arrived. Something sweet and small. We ate it slowly because neither of us was in a hurry and the restaurant was warm and the night outside was doing the thing New York did in November when the cold was sharp enough to make inside feel like a decision.

"After the hearing," he said.

"The day," I said. "You promised."

"The day," he confirmed. "And after that—" He paused. "I want to talk about what comes next. Not the unit, not the foundation. Us. Practically."

I looked at him. "Practically."

"You're in Queens. I'm in Midtown. That's a structural inconvenience I'd like to solve at some point." He held my gaze. "Not immediately. I'm not rushing anything. But I want you to know it's something I'm thinking about."

My heart was steady and loud.

"You're thinking about living together," I said.

"I'm thinking about what makes sense for two people who are genuinely in each other's lives," he said. "Which sometimes looks like living together and sometimes looks like other things." He paused. "I want to have the conversation. When you're ready."

I looked at him across the small space of the counter. The deliberate man who planned things carefully and said them plainly and had been learning me the way you learned something worth knowing.

"After the hearing," I said.

"After the hearing," he agreed.

He reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. Simple and unhurried. Like he had the right to and knew it and wasn't performing either thing.

"Okay," I said softly.

"Okay," he said back.

We stayed until the restaurant closed around us.