Trapped In The Billionaire’s Name

CHAPTER 37

Damian's POV

Monday night I couldn't sleep, not from anxiety, I was past that with the case. Everything that needed to be prepared was prepared. Lena had walked me through the sequence three times. Our legal team had done this particular type of proceeding before and knew the room. The documentation was airtight.

What kept me up was something quieter. The awareness that tomorrow was an ending and endings, even necessary ones, required something from you that wasn't purely strategic.

I was in the kitchen at two AM when my phone lit up.

Reina.

I picked up before the second ring. "You're awake."

"So are you," she said.

"Yes."

A pause. Not uncomfortable. The specific quality of two people choosing the same moment from separate places.

"What are you thinking about?" she said.

"My father," I said. Honest without deliberation. "Tomorrow feels like something I'm doing for him as much as anything else. And I keep thinking about what he'd say if he could see all of it."

"What do you think he'd say?"

I sat with it genuinely. "He'd be angry about the twenty years first," I said. "He was a man who didn't tolerate dishonesty in anything. It would have genuinely broken something in him." I paused. "And then I think he'd be relieved. That the endowment is going where he put it. That the people he trusted to steward it are gone."

"And about you?" she said.

"He'd probably say I should have listened to Julian sooner." I paused. "And he'd want to meet you."

She was quiet.

"I mean that," I said. "He'd have recognized immediately what you are. He was good at that — seeing people clearly without needing them to perform."

"Where do you think you got it?" she said softly.

"From him," I said. "Buried under twenty years of Celeste's architecture. But it was his." I looked at the window. "I think tomorrow is me giving it back to him. Intact."

A silence settled between us. Long enough to hold everything in it without words.

"I keep thinking about the night you came in," she said quietly. "The original night. I've replayed it a thousand times looking for what I missed. Tomorrow I think I'll be able to stop doing that."

"Yes," I said. "You will."

"I'm tired of carrying it," she said simply. "I'm ready to put it down."

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow," she said.

A pause. "Damian."

"Yes."

"Come over," she said. "Don't be alone tonight."

I was already standing up.

I was there in twenty minutes.

She opened the door in a grey sleep shirt and the composed version of her face slightly undone by the hour, and stepped back without words. I came in. She'd left the small lamp on. The apartment was warm and quiet.

We didn't talk about the case. We didn't talk about tomorrow specifically. We lay in her bed in the dark and she was close and real and her hand found mine in the space between us and we stayed like that until the city outside moved from deep night into the first grey suggestion of morning.

At some point she said, "Thank you for coming."

"You don't thank me for that," I said.

"I do," she said. "I choose to."

I turned my head. In the low dark she was looking at the ceiling, her face clear and still, carrying something she'd decided to carry lightly.

"I love you," I said.

She turned to look at me. "I know," she said. Then: "I love you too." As simple as everything she said that mattered.

I closed my hand around hers.

We slept.

Tuesday morning.

She was dressed before I was — scrubs and her good coat, hair up, the particular composure of someone who had decided what the day required and was meeting it exactly. I watched her move through her morning routine with the efficiency of a woman who had spent years operating in high-stakes environments before eight AM.

"You look ready," I said.

"I am ready," she said. No performance in it.

We took the car together. Marco was already outside the courthouse when we arrived — standing beside a man I recognized as Dante from the garage, both of them in their best approximation of courtroom adjacent clothing. Marco looked at Reina, then at me, and nodded once with the particular economy of a man who had said everything he needed to say across three weeks of unexpected phone calls.

Helena was inside the lobby. She crossed to me when she saw us, kissed my cheek, looked at Reina with the clear-eyed assessment I'd come to recognize as her version of warmth.

"You're exactly as Julian described," she said to Reina.

"How did he describe me?" Reina said.

"Sensible and immovable," Helena said. "He meant both as compliments." She pressed Reina's hand once and stepped back.

Julian arrived three minutes later, slightly breathless, jacket askew, carrying two coffees he handed to Reina and me without being asked.

"I'm not going in," he said. "But I needed to be here." He looked at me. "Twenty years, Damian."

"I know," I said.

"Dad would be furious," he said.

"I know."

"And really glad," he said. "That it's being fixed."

I put my hand on his shoulder briefly. He covered it with his for a moment. That was all.

Lena appeared at my elbow with the timing of someone who had managed an entrance. "Judge Mercer runs a punctual room. We will go in two minutes."

I looked at Reina.

She looked back at me — steady and present and entirely herself. The woman who had handed me divorce papers with a straight face and a morning shift to get to. The woman who had told me the truth about my own situation before she had any reason to trust me. The woman who had been carrying someone else's name on her life for eighteen months and was about to get it back.

"Ready?" I said.

"Ready," she said.

Her hand found mine briefly — a second, no more.

Then we walked in.