Billionaire Romance16 min read
Do You Hate Me? — The Night I Stopped Being Small
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“Do you hate me?” I asked before I could stop my voice.
He froze like the world had paused for me. Romeo Salazar’s jaw worked once, then he smiled a small, unreadable smile.
“No,” he said. “Why would you hate me, Gracelyn?”
I shouldn’t have answered. My mouth always betrayed me. “I… I don’t hate you,” I said, stumbling over the words. “I… I don’t.”
He watched my mouth like it was the only thing in the room that mattered. Around us the library hummed with study lamps and whispered pages. I pressed my palm to my chest and felt the ribs of my shame.
Thomas Banks stood three aisles over with his arm around a girl I didn’t know. They looked like lovers. I watched. My throat closed.
“Gracelyn?” Romeo’s voice came soft and very close.
“I—” I wanted to run. I did run. I turned down the aisle and hid among the stacks. I folded inside myself.
“You okay?” he asked, and that question was a net. I let it catch me.
“He kissed her,” I blurted when he knelt in front of me. I could not make the sound steady. “He—he kissed her in the open.”
Romeo’s face tightened. “Where?” he asked. “Which girl?”
I pointed. I said the words like a spell. “There. Thomas. He—”
He let out a low sound. I shivered. He was so calm. He put a hand on my forehead.
“Do you want to sit with me?” he asked.
I should have said no. I said yes.
We sat at an empty table. He made me soup from his thermos. He listened to how I stammered, mouthed apologies for words I could not shape. He placed a bare hand on my knuckles when the world felt loud. When I cried he didn’t say, “Toughen up.” He said, “It’s okay.” Nothing grand. Nothing that burned.
Later, when we walked out together, he held my bag as if he had been hired to guard it. He looked at me like I was fragile glass.
“Do you hate me?” he asked again, when I froze at the campus sun and the scarlet maples.
“No,” I said. “I don’t hate you.”
He smiled then, like someone who’d won something small and private. He walked slower as if he wanted the world to notice we were together.
That night I found a scrap of paper in the library chair where I’d left my textbooks. Eleven numbers, written in a hand I’d seen before—neat, dark. I stared until the ink blurred.
“Who gave you that?” Sabine Spencer asked in the dorm. She was my friend and my only loud thing in a day of whispers.
“I don’t know. Someone.” I kept the paper folded, my thumb pressed into the crease.
“Call him,” Sabine said. “Ask him who he is.”
“No.” I dropped my face into my hands. “I can’t.”
She grinned. “Then I will.” Her grin meant trouble. She grabbed my phone. She pressed the numbers.
The line clicked. A man’s voice said, “Hello?”
Sabine held the phone to my ear like a prize. “It’s Gracelyn,” I managed. My voice came like a mouse.
“Gracelyn?” He sounded closer than the dorm wall. “I’m here.”
“You— you—” I swore my mouth was traitor. “My books?”
“They’re safe.”
“Thank you.” I finally said the words I had been holding. “Can I— can I come to get them?”
“Yes,” he said. “Come tomorrow.”
I tried to write that whole night like a normal person. I failed. I rewrote the plan five times. I imagined every way I could enter and walk away without being watched. I pictured Thomas and the other girl laughing behind bushes. I pictured myself being small and wrong and alone.
The next night the rain came heavy, like a sheet pulled over the city. I was soaking through before I saw him.
“Gracelyn,” Romeo said. He wore a long coat. He blocked the light and made the air colder and yet safer. “Come here. Wait under the awning.”
“I can walk,” I said. My teeth chattered. My cardigan stuck to my arms.
“You’ll catch a cold,” he said. “Wait.”
I stood under the awning and he watched me like a person checking on a small animal. He asked me to wait, then texted me a map. I did not know if I was more frightened of the dark or of being near him.
A step behind me made me aware. I turned.
He was there. He grabbed my shoulder and spun me into the alley.
“Who are you?” I screamed. My voice was small in the rain.
“Shut up,” the man said. His breath smelled of cheap whiskey. He had a glint in his eye like a warning light.
I twisted. I pulled. My legs felt like wet noodles.
“Hey!” a voice cut through the rain.
I heard Romeo’s heels on the pavement. He was in the alley like he had materialized, hand on my shoulder, then between me and the stranger.
“Let her go,” he said very soft. The man laughed. He only laughed for a heartbeat.
“Nice? You’re late,” the man sneered. His hands were on me. I felt trapped like a bird in a hand.
Romeo moved. He did not shout. He did not sweet-talk. He just moved and the stranger’s laugh died.
The man staggered. Romeo was a wall. He shoved him. The stranger hit the bricks. He crawled away. He spat and vanished into the rain.
I folded into Romeo. I was wet and shaking. He smelled like bitter orange and leather. He wrapped his coat around me as if I were a child.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I—” I tried to count my breaths. “Yes.”
He pressed his forehead to mine. “I thought so,” he whispered. “You’re safe.”
I wanted to say thank you. I wanted to say anything but the knot in my stomach was a lead weight.
That night he took me to a cheap hotel two blocks away. The room had flowers and a blanketed bed and a small note that said his name in an ink that matched the numbers.
“Stay,” he said.
“I can go home,” I said. My voice still trembled.
“You can if you want,” he said. “But it’s night and I don’t trust the dark for you.”
I slept like someone who has been running for hours. I woke to a message that made me sick.
A phone buzzed. I looked down. A picture of me in the alley scrolled across my screen, close and unblurred. Then another. Then one where my face had been turned just right. The messages read: Don’t call the police. Don’t tell anyone. You’re mine.
My throat closed. I felt like an animal trapped in a net of glass.
Sabine would not let me be small. She took me to the police the next day. The officer—Caleb Contreras—listened with a gravity that steadied me.
“We’ll try,” he said. “We’ll look into it.”
But the messages kept coming. The last one had a link. I didn’t open it. The sender used a strange number and the voice in one voice message was low and mocking. I handed Caleb the phone. He frowned.
“We’ll trace it,” he said. He gave me a card. “Don’t leave town.”
That night my life changed on two fronts. The campus forum exploded. Somebody posted a photo of me stepping out of a car. The car’s logo glittered in the sunlight. The caption read: Look who gets rides to school now. Rich man’s girl.
My stomach dropped. The room spun.
“I didn’t—” I started.
Everyone looked. Their faces were small knives. The world pressed on me. I felt the old shame like a bruise.
Sabine reached for my arm. “This is bullshit,” she spat. “Who posted this?”
“It’s anonymous,” the narrator of our small life said. “It’s easy to make noise when you’re cowardly.”
Someone else dug through the thread. “Isn’t that Romeo Salazar’s car?”
I stared. I wanted to sink into the floor. I had not meant to connect him to the photo. I had not meant to drag him into this.
When they put words to him, it was worse and better. Worse because I feared he would be angry at me. Better because if he was the owner of that car then he was involved and maybe — I wished like a child that someone would protect me.
The rest of the day I could not think.
“What if he’s the one who took the photos?” Sabine said. “What if he’s the monster?”
“You don’t know that,” I said. My voice cracked.
“What if he set you up?” she whispered. “He could have taken those pictures and leaked them.”
I did not want that thought. It tasted like rust.
Later that night Romeo messaged me: Come see me. I need to talk.
I went. I knew I shouldn’t. He met me at the campus rear gate in the dim warm light. He had a folder in his hand.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“Your name is on a lot of things,” he said. He opened the folder. Inside were pictures — hundreds of them — of me at the library, in class, on the bus. They were not only from the night in the alley. He had photos that seemed to span months.
“Why do you have these?” I asked.
He smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes. “I like to know,” he said. “I like to keep what matters to me close.”
A cold wave slid down my spine. “Why?”
“Because you’re mine,” he said, flat and clear.
I laughed then, a short sound that surprised me. “You can’t own me.”
He reached for my hand and when his fingers closed around mine it felt like being caught. “But I can keep you,” he said. “Come to dinner. Let me explain.”
I let him lead me into his car. In the passenger seat my hand shook. On the dash a mini camera winked like a small secret. When he drove there was no radio. He drove like a man who counted the seconds between heartbeats.
At dinner Romeo was a gentleman. He spoke in measured sentences and he watched me like I was the prize in a very slow game. I remembered the alley, the way he had shoved the stranger away. I remembered the camera wall. I put the memories next to each other like puzzle pieces, then I had to stop or I would see a shape I did not like.
“Why did you help me in the alley?” I asked finally.
“Because I could not let someone else touch what belongs to me,” he said without blinking.
I swallowed. “You don’t own me.”
“You will let me protect you,” he said. “That is all.”
I wanted to say no. I wanted to run. I didn’t. I’m not brave in the big ways. I’m brave in small ones and even that is uneven. I let him lead me home and I let him linger until I felt like a person again. I slept in my own bed but I was not alone in the small way that the phone knows.
The posts on the forum turned into rumors. People whispered that I was using Romeo to climb. People laughed and called me names. They used the photos to hurt me. My scholarship application was questioned, even after my grades. My stomach tightened like a fist.
At class the next morning a girl shoved a flyer into my hand. Her smirk was bright and cruel. “Photos tell the truth,” it said.
“How could this happen?” Sabine asked. She was angry on my behalf and I loved her for it.
“You told him about Thomas,” Sabine said one night, piecing together a theory that felt like a rope. “You ran to him when you needed someone. He likes you because you made him need to be a hero. He wants to keep being the hero.”
“What if he set that alley up just to be there?” I whispered.
“Then we expose him,” she said. “We find his thread.”
We went to a friend of Sabine’s, Chance Vogt. He studied networks and could coax a stubborn IP into a confession.
“It won’t be easy,” Chance told me with two fingers on his temple, “but I can try. Give me his profile, profiles, phone, anything.”
I gave him what I had. He worked late. He sent me messages with technical words that meant nothing to me but gave my chest a small, warm hope.
“We found a cluster,” Chance finally wrote. “Some cameras. Some servers. One notable storage node.”
He wanted to go with me to the old warehouse. He said they were likely to keep backups there, a place abandoned by law and loved by small-time criminals.
“We’ll go with the police,” I said.
Caleb promised to help. He had a different look now. He looked like a man who had seen more than his years should allow. He drove us in a car with flashing lights that made me feel oddly safe.
The warehouse was in the dark rim of the city. We pushed through the gate. The floor smelled like oil and old rain. Chance’s hands moved like a magician around a laptop.
“We’re in,” Chance whispered. “There’s a folder. Photos. Videos. And—” He swallowed. “There’s a separate drive labeled ‘Favorites’.”
Caleb’s face read the word like a punch. He made a call.
“We will take everything down,” Caleb said. “You’ll come with us to the station.”
It felt like a trap being set for a man bigger than both of us. It was the right thing. I felt like something with color.
The raid should have been clean. It should have been the moment the truth pushed out.
Instead, there was an accident on the way to the station. A delivery truck slammed into the car that was taking a witness. Caleb’s call went dead. Sirens filled the night like distant bees. I stood in the rain and thought the world had cracked again, small and unclosable.
The “witness” — a tech guy who had helped identify the server — was badly hurt. He would not be talking for a while.
“You must be careful,” Romeo said when he heard. He appeared at my dorm like a constant shadow.
“I’m okay,” I lied.
“You’re shaken,” he said. He pressed his forehead to mine. “Don’t let them take you.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
He smiled. “The people who think they can own your story.”
I felt like a puppet whose strings were cut. I wanted the police to win. I wanted my life back. But small things had momentum; small men dug their claws in.
“What if the person who attacked me is connected to the servers?” I asked one night. Sabine was beside me, chewing a pencil.
“He is,” Chance said. “The drive points to a local address. Whoever runs the farm lives near the docks.”
“I want to go,” I said.
“You can’t,” Sabine said. “It’s risky.”
“I’ll go with you,” Romeo said in a voice that made the blood in my ears hot.
“No,” I said. My voice was sharp and quick. “I can’t do that.”
“You will if I ask,” Romeo said.
The “ask” was not a question. It was a line in a script I could not read. I felt my body obey, like some old habit.
We went to the docks. The building was a hunched thing that smelled like rust. The man who answered the door was small, mean with eyes like buttonholes.
He tried to shut the door.
I pushed past. I found a room full of screens. A wall of my pictures looked back at me like a gallery of someone who cataloged a life as a hobby. The room was full of things he had kept: my notes, a pressed leaf, a pendant I had thought I’d lost.
It took me a long time to put the pieces together. The unknown attacker in the alley had not been random. He had been one of many. This place fed off small things. He fed small pleasures.
“You should not have come,” Romeo said.
He had been in the corner the whole time, like a shadow that had come to life. I looked at him. The man in the corner and the man who saved me had the same face. But the eyes—his eyes—were different. Those eyes were not warm. They were precise, cold.
“You did this,” Sabine accused. “You set her up.”
“No.” Romeo’s voice was flat. “I did not set her up.”
“You have the photos,” Chance said. “You own the car. The posts. The connections.”
“So?” Romeo said.
“You had the guards take the server guy out,” Caleb said, stepping forward with a voice that shook. “He crashed. You were near the scene.”
Romeo’s face was a mask that could not be cracked.
“Enough,” I said. My voice surprised me. I had been small for too long. Something inside me was not small anymore. “Romeo—stand up.”
He did. The room had gone very quiet. The screens reflected light in his eyes. He looked like a king in a burned throne.
“I thought you loved me,” I said. “You were watching me for months.”
He didn’t laugh. He smiled. “I love you,” he said. “I made sure you were safe. I removed threats.”
“You removed a policeman’s life,” Chance said. “You killed a witness.”
“I made choices,” Romeo said. “You asked me to protect you.”
“You did more than protect,” I said. “You trapped me. You made me small.”
He took a step closer. I shrank. “I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t mean?” I echoed. “You took my body to extra rooms and put a camera there. You made money off my shame.”
“I kept you,” he whispered.
“You kept me like a thing,” I said. “You kept me like an object and then used me to prove how much you cared.”
“You're trying to turn this on me,” he said. “You called the police. You tried to bring men into our space.”
“My body is my space,” I said. “You do not get to decide.”
It felt like a tribunal. The walls hummed. Chance’s hands were white on the laptop. Caleb’s face was stone.
“I will let the police sort this,” he said, then he looked at me and his eyes softened in a way that made me sick. “But if you put your life in the hands of strangers, I will not be responsible for what happens to you.”
We left with him. Romeo walked ahead. He said nothing. That silence was a blade.
After the warehouse, the forum turned meaner. Someone had been posting deeper things. A leaked video showed pieces of a night where someone forced me into a room. The school whispered. People stopped holding my eyes.
I could not breathe.
Sabine and Chance would not back down. “We will find proof he staged the posts,” Chance said. “There are logs, footprints. He made the link.”
I wanted to believe him. I did believe him in small ways.
Then, at the scholarship interview, everything collided.
It was the award committee room, long and cold. My hands shook when I slid the last copy of my essay across the table. I had practiced my speech. I had rehearsed words that could hold the truth of my life.
“Gracelyn Bentley,” the chair announced. “You have been chosen.”
My knees almost gave. I felt like I had climbed a mountain and here was the flag.
Then the lights went out. The room went dark. A hush fell. The projector flicked on. The screen showed a wall—Romeo’s wall—filled with my photos. It showed folders, labeled with times. It showed video of the alley. The click of the projector was loud as thunder.
My heart slammed into my ribs. I felt someone tap my shoulder. Sabine.
“We have been collecting,” Chance’s voice came from a small speaker. “We used a mirror server to trace the uploads. We traced the bookmarks and we found one origin point.”
The image on the screen shifted to a face. The grainy camera angle showed someone in a parked car, bare hands adjusting a lens, the logo of a jacket that matched Romeo’s. The picture flashed—his car logo.
“Who did this?” someone in the room demanded.
“Romeo Salazar,” Chance said. “We have the backups. We have the logs. We have the backups of the backups.”
For the first time, the room made noise. People murmured. A woman stood up and faced me, eyes wet. “Oh my God.”
Romeo rose from the back like a man called to a stage. He looked at the screen. He looked at me.
“You planted this?” someone shouted. “You ruined her!”
“You told me not to go to the police,” Romeo said. His voice was soft but it cut. “You told me to keep you safe. I am keeping that promise.”
“You kept us in secret,” Chance said. “You paid off people. You crashed a car.”
“I did what I had to,” Romeo said. He looked at me. His eyes were two different things. He was sad and monstrous at once.
“I trusted you,” I said. I felt words grow like thorns. “Do you know what it is like to be trapped by the world? Do you know what it is to have your life pried open like a shell?”
His pupils shrank. “You asked me to be here.”
“I asked for a hand,” I said. “Not for a jailer.”
“You were small and afraid,” Romeo said. “I took care of the fear.”
“Taking care of me does not give you ownership of my life,” I said. “Not now. Not ever.”
Someone from the committee called the campus police. Caleb was there in a minute and other officers followed. The room filled with uniforms and questions. They grabbed Romeo.
“I didn’t do it,” he whispered, when they cuffed him. “I only saved her.”
“You saved her from who?” an officer asked.
“From the people who wanted to hurt her,” he said. Then, louder, “I loved her.”
“You hurt her,” I said. The words sat heavy between us.
They led him away. His face was calm. He turned his head and our eyes met once.
“Gracelyn,” he said. The name like a knife. “I did it for love.”
“You did it for yourself,” I said. “You did it for your control.”
In the hall, someone pressed a camera to my face. Questions came like rain.
“When did you notice?” a reporter asked. “Did you know he was taking pictures?”
“Yes,” I said. The last word felt like a release. “I knew some. I didn’t know the whole. I didn’t see the wall. I didn’t know about the server. I didn’t know he would hurt a man to hide it.”
“You’re lucky,” someone said. “He could have gotten away.”
“He did get away with a lot,” Caleb said softly. “But not now.”
The trial was not simple. It was not clean. Evidence was heavy and ugly and focused. There were videos of my pictures in files labeled with his handwriting. There were transactions traced to payments. There were messages where he wrote how he needed to keep me. There were witnesses who said they’d been paid or silenced.
He denied everything at first. “I only did what was necessary,” he said to the judge. “I kept her safe.”
“What is protection when it binds?” the prosecutor shot back. She had a steady voice and a small sharp smile.
“He was jealous,” a woman testified. “He kept us in lists, in categories. I was afraid.”
When the truth came out, it hit like a window dropping to the floor. People had loved him. He had been a figure — rich, quiet, handsome. He had a public face that had been kind. The second face was ugly and private.
At the sentencing Romeo sat very still. “I thought love meant saving,” he said to me. He looked like a man who had lost everything.
“You were not saving me,” I said. “You were owning me.”
He closed his eyes like a child who does not understand the end of a story. He said nothing more.
I sat in the courtroom and listened to the judge mark his fate. I felt numb and strange. I had expected fireworks, a feeling of triumph, of rightness. Instead I felt empty, like a cup finally put down.
After he was taken away, the whispering in the school subsided into a dull white noise. The posts stopped. The photos were removed. The scholarship committee apologized. I did not feel relief. I felt different. I felt like a thing that had been pushed through a fire.
Sabine leaned over and squeezed my hand. “You did it,” she said.
“We did it,” Chance corrected. He was tired but steady. He would not be small either.
I walked out of the court and the winter air hit my face. A small breeze carried leaves. I thought of the moments that made me small—the questions I couldn’t ask, the fear that sat on my chest.
I had been broken in many ways. I had been kept small by men who thought they knew what was best. I had been told I could not speak.
I still felt afraid sometimes. I still had nights when my chest tightened and the shadow of a camera made my skin prickle.
But something had changed. I had watched him taken away and I had said it out loud: “You do not own me.”
The world did not explode. It turned. The sun moved. I went back to class. I practiced saying my own name out loud more often.
One afternoon Sabine barged into the office, paper in hand. “They want you to talk,” she said. “The campus is running a program. To help survivors.”
I hesitated. Talking felt dangerous. It felt like tearing an old bruise. But I also thought of the wall of photos and the people who thought they had the right to look and keep and laugh. Not everyone got a chance to fight.
“I will do it,” I said. “I will go.”
The day I stood in front of a dozen faces and a small camera, my hands shook. I began to speak.
When I finished, an old woman in the front row stood up. “You are brave,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I was pushed into being brave. But I will keep it.”
The campus program grew. People came and stories were shared. Some cried. Some laughed. A few thanked me.
Romeo’s sentence came down. He was barred from the internet, from certain properties, and he went to prison for his crimes. The newspapers ran photos of his empty house. The camera wall was cataloged as evidence. Pieces of my life he had stolen were returned to me in awkward brown boxes. I burned some things. I kept a letter he’d written me, the one where he’d tried to explain and failed. I kept it not as a talisman but as a record that I had been seen.
I changed some things. I stopped answering unknown numbers. I learned to walk faster at night. I bought pepper spray and a small whistle and left it by my keys. I learned to ask for help and accept it. I learned to say no and mean it.
Months later a girl came up to me under the same old library lamps. She had a notebook and a tremor in the voice. “Do you have a minute?” she asked.
I remembered the years of being small. I remembered Thomas walking away into someone else’s arms. I remembered the alley and the water and the night the world turned.
“Of course,” I said.
She sat. Her hands were like mine had been.
“I saw your talk,” she whispered. “I’m scared.”
“I know,” I said. I thought of all the helpers that had stood with me—Sabine, Chance, Caleb, the quiet brave strangers who had seen.
“You will be okay,” I promised. Not because I knew everything, but because I knew how to hold a hand steady.
The moon came up behind the library windows, pale and round. Once, Romeo called me his moon. It felt wrong then. Now the moon felt like a simple thing—there whether I looked or not.
I went home that night and opened my small box. Inside was a paper moon I had once folded in a class. I set it on the windowsill. It was small and white and ordinary.
I put my fingertips on it and whispered, “I am not yours.”
The paper moon did not answer. It simply shone pale under the streetlamp. I smiled and closed the window.
I still hear echoes sometimes. I still flinch at a camera flash. But I say my name now. I say it loud enough that the people who used to think they could make me small have to listen.
The last time I saw Romeo was a month before his trial ended. He was led past the courtroom window like a ghost. Our eyes met. He mouthed something—probably my name.
I said nothing. I had nothing more to give him.
I took a breath of the cold air and held it. Then I let it out, and it felt like a small clean thing.
“Goodbye,” I said. It was not for him alone. It was for the fever and the fear, the nights that had taken me apart and put me back together.
Outside, the moon watched. The paper one on my sill stayed white. The night was vast and full and mine.
The End
— Thank you for reading —