Page 86 of Billionaire’s Ruin

For orders. For signs. For someone to swoop in and make the universe make sense again. And maybe that made me foolish. Or scared. Or human.

But I couldn’t admit that right now.

Not to him.

Not when everything inside me already seemed on the verge of coming apart.

So instead, I turned away, muttering, “You don’t get to talk to me like that.”

Lincoln paused long enough for the air between us to thin and stretch.

Then he murmured, quieter, “Then don’t put me in situations where I feel forced to.”

That was it.

The last straw.

A fucking joke.

All of it.

They wanted me to stay hidden, stay quiet, stay out of sight—then Lincoln turned around and accused me of “waiting for someone to tell me what to do.”

What the hell did he expect?

That I’d put on a cape and go storm the Li family home myself?

I swallowed the retort, burning the back of my throat and chose the more dramatic, petty option: I stormed off.

The guest room door slammed behind me—loud, sharp, cathartic—louder than I meant it to be.

Lincoln had slept in this room before I arrived. Just another reminder that this entire space carried someone else’s presence. Someone else’s scent. Someone else’s memories.

Never Kai’s.

And I loathed that.

Loathed walking past his closed bedroom.

Loathed imagining what his sheets smelled like, what state his pillows were in.

Loathed that Lincoln would never let me sleep in there.

“It’s not appropriate,” he’d said.

“It’ll mess with your head.”

Too late for that.

Way too late.

The truth was, I wanted to be surrounded by anything that carried even the faintest trace of him.

The lingering warmth of his scent.

His belongings—anything that made him real in this space.

Any shred of proof that Kai wasn’t a dream I’d made up to survive the last few days. That he was still real—out there somewhere breathing the same air as me.