Trapped In The Billionaire’s Name

CHAPTER 7

Damian's POV

She ordered the gnocchi and ate it without ceremony.

I don't know why that stayed with me. I've had dinner with women who treated a meal like a performance — the careful portioning, the "oh I shouldn't”, the fork set down after two bites. Reina ate like someone who worked twelve-hour shifts and had a real relationship with food. She didn't perform anything. Not comfort, not restraint, not enjoyment. She just was.

I found myself watching her more than I should have.

"You're staring," she said, without looking up.

"I'm aware."

"Is that supposed to be charming?"

"No," I said. "It's just honest."

She looked up then. Something flickered behind her eyes — not discomfort. More like she was deciding what to do with a thing she hadn't expected.

"Ask what you actually want to ask," she said. "You've been building toward something for twenty minutes."

She was right. I'd noticed it myself — the way I kept approaching the real question and redirecting. With anyone else I would've just asked it. With her I kept finding myself wanting to earn the answer first.

"The night I was brought in," I said. "Do you remember me?"

She set her fork down. "Yes."

"What do you remember?"

A pause. Not evasive — considering. "You came in unconscious. Blunt trauma from the accident. You were alone for the first hour because your emergency contact didn't pick up." She said it plainly, without making it dramatic. "I sat with you during intake. Talked to you while we ran the initial vitals. Patients in that state sometimes respond to a calm voice."

Something tightened in my chest. "You talked to me."

"It's standard practice."

"What did you say?"

She looked at me steadily. "I told you that you were okay. That someone was there. That you didn't have to do anything except breathe." A pause. "The things people need to hear when they're scared and can't say so."

I sat with that for a moment. Three weeks of my life were erased and somewhere in the beginning of it, before I knew anything, this woman had been the one telling me to breathe.

"I didn't know that," I said.

"I know you didn't."

"Reina—"

"Don't," she said quietly. Not harsh. Just firm. "Don't make it something it wasn't. I was doing my job. I do it for everyone."

"I know. That's not why it—" I stopped. Reorganized. "It matters to me because of who you turned out to be. Not because of what you did."

She looked at me for a long moment. Something in her face was working very hard to stay even.

"That's a dangerous sentence," she said finally.

"I know."

"Damian. We signed papers today."

"I know that too."

"So what exactly are we doing?"

Honest question. She asked it without heat or agenda — just a woman who didn't see the point of pretending she wasn't thinking about it. I respected that more than I could quantify. I was surrounded daily by people who never said what they meant. She said what she meant and then looked at you and waited.

"I don't know," I said. "I haven't known since the morning you opened your door and handed me a folder."

"That bothers you. Not knowing."

"Normally yes." I looked at her across the table. "With you, less than it should."

She was quiet. Then she picked her fork back up, not because the conversation was over but because she was thinking and she didn't need to fill the silence to prove she was present. That was the thing about her — she was completely comfortable in silence in a way that made you want to fill it not out of anxiety but out of genuine desire to give her more to consider.

I wanted to know what she was thinking at every moment. I hadn't wanted that with anyone in years.

"Tell me about the kids," I said. "On your ward."

She looked up. "What about them?"

"You talk about your job the way most people talk about something they chose ten times over. I want to know why."

Something softened in her face — not dramatically, just a slight release of the careful composure she wore like a second skin. "There's a girl on my ward right now. Six years old. She's been in and out for eight months. Every time she sees me she asks me if I remember her favorite color."

"Do you?"

"Yellow," she said immediately. "I remembered it on day two. Now she asks because it makes her feel known." A pause. "That's the whole job, really. Making people feel known when everything around them is unfamiliar and frightening."

I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time — the specific quiet of being in the presence of someone whose values were completely intact. Not performed. Just present.

"You could've done anything," I said. "With that kind of intelligence."

She raised an eyebrow. "I did do something."

"You know what I mean."

"I do," she said. "And I've heard it before, usually from people who think nursing is a backup plan." She looked at me evenly. "Is that what you think?"

"No," I said. And I meant it completely. "I think you chose the hardest thing and made it look effortless and that's not a small thing. That's actually the rarest thing I've ever encountered."

Her jaw tightened slightly. Barely visible. The tell she had when something landed and she didn't want to show it.

I filed it away. I was collecting them — the small cracks in the composure, not to use but just to understand her.

"I need to ask you something," she said. "And I need you to answer honestly."

"Always."

"Celeste," she said. "Your stepmother. What do you actually know about her?"

The table shifted. Not physically — in temperature.

I kept my expression neutral but something in me went alert in the way it did when a board meeting stopped being routine.

"Why?" I said.

Her eyes were steady and completely serious.

"Because," she said quietly, "I've been thinking about that night for eighteen months. And there are things about how it happened that still don't make sense to me. And I think—" She paused. "I think she knew exactly what she was doing when she walked through those doors.”