The Billionaire she threw away

Chapter 03

The Billionaire She Threw Away

Chapter Three

Benjamin didn't wait around to see what happened next. The second Seth turned away from the broken man on the ground, Benjamin grabbed Rose by the wrist and pulled her toward whatever car still worked, and within seconds they were gone, tires screeching off into traffic like the street itself was on fire.

"Seth, go after them," Geena said, already half turning toward her own car, fury still bright in her eyes.

"No." Jensen put a hand on her arm. "Let them go."

"Jensen, they need to answer for this—"

"They will. Just not tonight." He looked at her properly for the first time since she'd thrown her arms around him, taking in her face, the same face he hadn't seen in person in almost two years. "I haven't seen you in forever, Geena. I don't want to spend the only hour I get with you chasing down two people who aren't worth the gas."

That seemed to land. Her shoulders dropped a little, some of the fury draining out of her. She nodded once, sharp, like she was filing the unfinished business away for later rather than letting it go entirely, and gestured for him to get in the SUV.

The inside smelled like leather and her perfume, something expensive and unfamiliar that he didn't recognize from before he'd left. The dashboard alone probably cost more than every paycheck he'd earned across four years combined. He sat there for a second just absorbing how strange it felt, climbing back into a world built for people like him after spending so long pretending he belonged in the other one.

Four years ago, riding in a car like this would have felt normal, almost boring. Now every detail caught his attention. The stitching on the seats. The quiet hum of the engine, barely audible compared to the buses he'd been riding to his night shifts. The way Geena's bodyguards in the front seat didn't say a word, didn't even glance back, completely used to silence and obedience in a way that used to be normal for him too. He'd forgotten how loud the world outside this kind of car actually was.

Geena didn't start the engine right away. Instead she turned in her seat and just looked at him, eyes glassy.

"Two years, Jensen." Her voice cracked slightly. "Two years of phone calls I had to make in secret like I was doing something wrong, just to hear your voice for five minutes. Do you have any idea what that was like for me?"

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You don't get to apologize. The rule wasn't yours to break and it wasn't fair to ask you to." She wiped at her eyes fast, annoyed at herself for crying. "I just missed you. That's all. I missed you so much."

He pulled her into a proper hug across the console, the kind they hadn't been able to have in years, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

When she finally pulled back, her tone had shifted, something more careful underneath it. "Grandfather's been asking about you. More than usual, lately. He says he has something important to talk to you about."

Jensen felt his jaw tighten before he could stop it.

"Of course he does," he said, flat. "Alfred Pike doesn't reach out unless he wants something. That's the only time that man has ever called anyone in his life. He sees people the way he sees pieces on a chessboard, useful for a purpose, and once the purpose is finished, he puts them back in the box. He didn't call once during my entire trial. Not once. Now suddenly he has something important to say."

Geena watched his face darken and decided, wisely, not to push it any further. She reached over and started the engine instead, letting the silence do the work of changing the subject.

A few blocks into the drive, she glanced over and noticed him wincing as he shifted in the seat.

"You're hurt." It wasn't a question, more an accusation than anything else.

"I'm fine," he said quickly.

"You keep saying that and you keep being wrong." She reached into the glove box and pulled out a small first aid kit, the kind only someone who traveled with bodyguards would think to keep stocked, and without asking, started dabbing at the cut on his lip with an antiseptic wipe.

He let her. There was something about the careful, focused way she worked, brow furrowed, completely absorbed in fixing him up, that made the ache in his ribs feel a little further away. She'd always been like this, even as a kid, fussing over a scraped knee like it was a medical emergency while their grandfather's house staff stood by uselessly, unsure whether they were even allowed to comfort a child who wasn't a blood relative of the family. Geena had never cared about that distinction for a single day of her life.

"Why did you have to suffer like this?" she asked quietly, not looking up from his lip. "Four years out there, no money, no name, getting treated like nothing. And tonight on top of it, getting beaten up in some private room because of a girl who didn't deserve five minutes of your time." Her hand had gone still against his jaw. "I hated knowing you were out there and I couldn't do anything about it. I hated it every single day. I used to lie awake wondering if you were eating enough, if you had somewhere warm to sleep, if some idiot like that bodyguard tonight was putting his hands on you while I sat in a house with eleven empty bedrooms."

"It's over now," Jensen said softly. "I'm okay."

"You're not okay. You're just used to it, and that's not the same thing." She finally looked up, and there were tears standing in her eyes again, this time not bothering to wipe them away. "I don't want you to be used to it anymore."

The space between them had gotten smaller without either of them quite deciding to close it, her hand still resting against his face, his arm still loosely around her shoulders from the hug. For one strange, suspended second, something passed between them that had nothing to do with being siblings. Jensen felt it and immediately hated himself a little for feeling it. He'd spent his whole life treating her as his little sister, the kid who used to fall asleep in his room during thunderstorms, and whatever this was sitting in the car right now didn't belong anywhere near that picture.

He was the one who pulled back first.

His phone rang at exactly the moment the silence had started to feel dangerous, and he'd never been more grateful for bad timing in his life.

"Colman," he said, answering fast.

"Where the hell are you?" Colman's voice came through fast and worried, the way it always did when he thought Jensen might be doing something stupid. "You're not still at that club, are you? I heard Rose was seeing someone else. If you're sitting in a bar somewhere drinking your problems away, I swear I will come find you—"

"I'm fine, Colman. I'm with my sister."

"Your sister? Since when do you—wait, you have a sister?"

"Long story. I'll explain when I'm back."

"You'd better. And eat something, you sound exhausted." Colman hung up before Jensen could answer, which was exactly the kind of thing he always did.

Geena was smiling when Jensen lowered the phone. "Does he always worry about you like that?"

"Always. He's been like that since the day we met." Jensen allowed himself a small, real smile, the first one all night that didn't cost him anything. "Colman's one of maybe three people who were actually kind to me these past four years, and he never once asked why I needed it."

"I like him already."

They ended up at the Belmont, the kind of hotel Jensen had walked past a hundred times as a student without ever imagining he'd see the inside of one of its suites. Geena ordered up a bottle of something expensive, and the two of them sat on the floor of the presidential suite with their shoes off, talking and laughing about nothing important until the night blurred soft at the edges. She told him about the people back home he hadn't seen in years, who'd gotten married, who'd been quietly cut out of the family for one failure or another, who Alfred had started grooming for positions Jensen hadn't even known existed. He told her, carefully, about the version of his last four years that didn't sound as bad as it had actually been, leaving out most of the parts that would have made her cry again. It wasn't romantic. It wasn't supposed to be. It was just two people who'd missed each other finally getting the hours back that the rule had stolen from them.

They slept in separate bedrooms. Whatever strange current had passed between them in the car stayed exactly where it belonged, unspoken and untouched, and by morning it felt almost like it hadn't happened at all.

Jensen woke up to sunlight and a headache, and found Geena already up, scrolling through something on her phone with a small, satisfied smile.

"What's that look for?"

She turned the screen toward him. A financial news headline, Starr Holdings stock down sharply overnight on heavy trading volume, analysts citing unexplained sell pressure.

"You did this," he said, half a question.

"I might have made a few calls last night. Told some people to start shorting Starr's stock hard." She shrugged like it was nothing. "Benjamin embarrassed you in front of half that club. I wasn't going to just let that go unanswered."

Jensen looked at the number again, then at her, and felt something between exhaustion and amusement settle over him. "You really didn't have to do that."

"I know. I wanted to." She closed the app, entirely unbothered. "Don't pretend you're upset about it."

He wasn't. He didn't say so, but he wasn't.

By midmorning he needed to get back to campus before anyone started asking questions about where he'd disappeared to overnight. Geena offered to send him in one of the family cars, with a driver and Seth riding escort the whole way, the kind of arrival that would have every student on the quad staring out their windows.

"No," Jensen said. "Not yet. I'm not ready for everyone to know who I am. Not until I decide how I want to do this."

She looked like she wanted to argue, but something in his face must have told her this wasn't a fight worth having yet. "Fine. But Seth goes with you, even if you don't see him. I'm not asking on that one."

He didn't fight her on that part. After last night, he didn't really want to.

He hugged her once more at the door, holding on a beat longer than usual, and then took the elevator down alone and caught a regular taxi outside the hotel, just another guy heading back to a dorm room that smelled like old takeout and unwashed laundry. The driver complained about traffic the entire ride and never once looked twice at his passenger, never had any reason to suspect that the tired kid in the back seat had ten million dollars sitting in an account he hadn't told a single soul about. For now, that was exactly how Jensen wanted it to stay.

He watched the campus gates come into view through the window, the same gates he'd walked through a thousand times feeling smaller than everyone around him. Tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever he finally decided he was ready, those gates were going to mean something completely different. Tonight, he just wanted one more night as nobody, before the rest of his life caught up to him for good.