They Rejected Me—Then I Married The Billionaire They Feared Chapter 08
The year I was seventeen, one of my father’s rivals had me kidnapped. They kept me in an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn.
There was another boy locked in there with me.
He shoved me into an empty janitor’s closet and drew the men off himself. By the time the police and my father arrived, it was Adrian who opened the closet door and lifted me out.
From that day on, I believed Adrian was the one who’d saved me.
Now, looking back, all he’d been was the last person to find me.
Felix’s eyes dropped to the bracelet on my wrist. His voice had gone slightly petulant.
“You told me you’d remember me for the rest of your life. Then the Grants packed up and moved to London and I didn’t even get a phone number out of you.”
My mouth opened. Then, quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Felix pulled me a little closer.
“Forget it. Adrian’s just always been very good at taking credit.”
I couldn’t help laughing.
I didn’t notice the figure in the corner of the ballroom.
Adrian stood in the shadows, his face bloodless.
He watched Felix hold me. Watched me laugh into Felix’s chest. His fingers curled tighter and tighter until his knuckles went white.
He had never once let himself admit he loved me.
He liked the way I chased him. He hated the way people said he’d risen on the Grants’ back. So he’d pushed me away, again and again, using the ugliest words he could find to grind me down.
Now I was actually gone.
And he didn’t even have the standing to walk over.
Not until Felix and I climbed the stairs hand in hand did Adrian seem to snap back into himself.
Logan’s call came through, his voice sharp with panic.
“Where the hell are you? Sienna’s gone again. She took a call from Evelyn and just walked out—Evelyn made her leave us.”
Adrian frowned.
“Evelyn called her?”
He’d been standing in the ballroom the entire time.
I hadn’t so much as touched my phone.
Logan’s voice got hotter.
“Who else could it have been? Sienna told me herself. Get over here and help me find her before something else happens.”
Adrian was quiet for a few seconds.
“Call the police.”
The line went silent.
Logan sounded like he hadn’t heard right.
“What did you say?”
“Call the police. Let them investigate.”
Adrian hung up and turned toward the estate’s security office.
He had the guards pull the surveillance from the past several years.
Every incident Sienna had ever wept about—every time she’d sworn I’d hurt her—he watched them, one by one.
She jumped into the pool herself.
She pushed the cake off the table herself.
She cut her own dress apart.
She threw herself down the stairs.
Before every one of her sobbing collapses on the floor, she checked—carefully, precisely—that the cameras couldn’t catch the crucial angle.
Adrian stared at the screen, and the color drained out of his face inch by inch.
All those years. Every time Sienna had come to him in tears, saying my name, none of the three of them had ever asked a single question.
They just came to me.
Made me apologize.
Made me bow my head.
The footage kept playing.
Adrian suddenly drew back his fist and drove it into his own jaw.
The guard flinched to his feet.
Adrian didn’t say a word. He turned and walked out of the security room.
He didn’t come to see me that night.