Billionaire Romance12 min read
He Saved Me Twice — Then Broke Every Chain
ButterPicks12 views
I woke with my heart pounding.
"Not again," I mouthed, hands trying to steady a body that still felt like glass.
I swung my legs out of bed and cursed the cold. My left leg ached like someone had set it on fire and left it there. I winced and pulled my delivery jacket tight.
"Morning, Journee," the landlord barked through the thin door.
"Morning," I called back, voice small.
I eat, I work, I sleep. Repeat. That was my life now. Three years ago I had a different life—bright lights, a future, an engagement. Then everything collapsed.
"You're still the same," I told my reflection, the scar on my hand like a pale promise. "No pity. No asks."
I zipped my bag and left. The city was a blade of wind; my breath froze into white. I pushed my battered e-bike into traffic, fingers going numb.
At the red light a green McLaren rolled up beside me. Three young rich people tumbled out; one of them spat a joke like a coin.
"Look at her," the taller one sneered. "Drew's old trash. How low can you go?"
My chest tightened. Drew Yamada. He had been mine—the reason I had believed in a future. He had left me the night I needed him, left me when my life broke.
"Hey—" the drunk one lurched, his eyes slick. "Since when did the city's prettiest streamer become a delivery girl?"
"You look like you belong under a bridge," a woman laughed.
That laugh pulled a wire inside me. I kicked at him.
"Get off me!" I shouted.
"She bites," one of them jeered.
The man—Grady Nielsen—grabbed my arm and jerked me toward his car like I was nothing.
"Let go!" I shoved him. The wind stole my breath.
"Drive," Grady hissed. He wound his hand to hit me.
I lunged, slipped from his grip, and ran.
"Stop!" Grady cursed. He slammed the car into reverse and accelerated.
I ran with what I had: one good leg and a will that would not break. My breaths were loud and ragged. Footsteps pounded behind me.
"Please!" I cried, and there, in the blur of headlights, a door opened. I dove into a back seat and slammed it shut.
"Sir, please—someone help me—" I begged, throat raw.
The man at the wheel turned. He looked up into the rearview and froze. He watched me like somebody catching a familiar song on a radio after years.
"Stay," he said, the word soft and steady.
I sat with my back shaking. The car door locked. I heard Grady's shout and then the man's footsteps—fast, controlled. In under five minutes, Grady was on the asphalt, winded and on his knees.
"Who the hell are you?" Grady spat.
The man moved like a shadow with purpose. He stopped Grady with a stomp and a throw that toppled him as if he weighed nothing.
When he came back to the car he smelled like cedar and something clean. He reached the rear door, bent, and said, "Are you hurt?"
"Thank you," I said. The words tasted like honey.
"Where do you live?" he asked.
"Just... up that way." My voice was small. I thought of my broken bike, my rent overdue, my future missing in action.
"Hop out at the corner," he said. "I'll drop you off."
The ride was three words and a hand squeezed to steady me. He helped me out by a pile of rust that used to be my e-bike. My whole world sat in that crate.
"It's smashed," I whispered.
"Let me try," he said. He picked up tools like someone had always known them.
Half an hour later, the rattle that had been my only income hummed like a tired animal. He refused my money.
"I don't take money," he said when I pressed sweaty bills at him.
"You don't owe me charity," I said.
"Then don't owe me pride." He smiled in a way that felt like coming home.
He went to call someone. He said a name—"Ellis"—and the way he said it made me think of someone with keys to networks I could not see. Later I learned Ellis Hashimoto would be his inside man.
He handed me a card. No name, only an address and a number.
"If you want to say thank you right, bring me dinner sometime," he teased.
I looked up at him and tried to read his face. He looked older than his laugh—clean, clothes that fit like they were made for him. He had hands that were capable, not rough. He had the look of someone who did not belong where he was, but belonged somewhere.
"I'm Journee," I said.
"Jackson," he answered, a small bow of the head like we were in daylight on a different street.
The next day he showed up at my door with a key and a grin and ten thousand dollars—paid to my landlord.
"You're mad," I protested.
"You're not," he said. "Move the curtain into two sides. You sleep in the bed. I can do the floor. I'm not a monster."
"You paid my rent," I said, stunned.
"You can pay me back," he said, "or not."
I made rules I planned to keep: I wouldn't be charity. I would earn back every cent. I would not fall for the man who looked like a storybook prince. I put my hand on my leg and said out loud, "I will not be saved. I will save myself."
He lived with me anyway. He boiled water, fixed a broken socket, and when a neighbor woman touched him like she owned the man he only smiled apologetic and let her leave smitten.
"Who are you, really?" I asked one night as we shared a bowl of cheap noodles.
"Someone who was a coward until yesterday," he said.
That was a lie. Or maybe not. A week later, after he'd bought me winter boots and a pile of fruit that filled our tiny room with citrus smell, he made a call and I heard the name "Isabela Best."
"You're connected to them," I said quietly. His face did not change.
"No," he said. "But I know people who can find answers."
Answers came. Ellis called from his phone in a whisper. "Jackson, I pulled a file. She's the woman—Journee Peterson. Three years ago the court... There was a rough case. The woman who died was Isabela Best, heir to the Best fortune. People pointed to you because you and the victim's fiancé had a fight."
The nights I slept in prison came back like a film strip. I told myself to breathe. Jackson folded his napkin like he was folding a map.
"Stop," I said. "It's useless. I'm a ghost to them. I lost everything."
He took my hand.
"Not anymore," he said.
He was Jackson Watkins. That name should have filled the room, shifted the floor. Stewarted the world. But he was quiet about it. He told me his father had money, he told me he had his own problems—ignore the name, he said. He wore a watch like a secret and a silence like armor.
"Why help me?" I asked.
He laughed and the sound was close and dangerous and safe. "You saved me first," he said. "You were my anchor in a dark time I don't talk about. You pulled me from a hole in my past."
"You hardly know me."
"Tell me about the candy," he said.
I blinked.
"The strawberry candy," he said. "You used to share it with someone when you were little. You said someone made you smile."
I had told him that story like it was a shard of a different life—about a boy at the summer house who gave me a pink candy and called me "Morning Joe" instead of my name. I wondered how he knew.
"Because you told me," he said. "And because I remembered the smell of sugar on your tongue."
We cooked, we fought, we laughed. He learned my postage of small habits: the way I liked salty things more than sweets, the way I tapped my foot when nervous, the way I hid the last coin when the rent week came.
"Do you trust me?" he asked once, as I packed my bag to go to the market.
"I trust my own hands first," I said. "But you—you're not a stranger anymore."
He held the door as I rode. He found jobs to arrange so my routes were short. He changed the delivery algorithm for me—subtle perks that doubled tips and shortened rides. "Game only you can see," he said. "Play it."
People loved us. Jackson was the clean-faced helper; I was the girl who had been bent but not broken. We kept our small world tidy. He stole me blood oranges and turned them into sunburst slices on the table. He said, "Eat." I ate.
But the old world had teeth. Grady and Isabela were not the only ones who had been watching.
One afternoon, as I was making a stupid good red-braised pork for my friend Julia—who was finally flying home from abroad—Drew appeared. His face was thinner, his charm slicker.
"Journee," he said. He stepped into my path like a memory with a license plate. "We can fix this. You and me. Back to how things were."
"I am not what I was," I said. "And you had your hands off when it counted."
"People make mistakes."
"Some of us got sent to prison for your mistakes," I said. "Do you remember me asking you to stand? You left."
A hand closed on Drew's wrist and folded him like an instruction. Jackson's voice came low.
"Apologize," he said.
Drew's smile slid. "Sorry." It sounded like a television actor left in the rain.
"You will never touch her again," Jackson said. He squeezed until Drew's face woke up with pain.
"Now," Jackson said, to me. "Do you want her to go?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then do not let him swing," Jackson said. He set Drew on his feet and then made him leave. Drew walked away like a man whose mask had been torn off and he had to keep walking.
That night, however, a storm hit. Jackson's people—some of them in suits and some in black—found Grady. They gave him a warning he would not forget. Video links and documents started to slip out. By morning the market was alive with gossip. Grady's father called and his bank accounts were frozen. Isabela's image took hits too; cameras caught her at places she could not justify.
"How?" I asked.
"Ellis," Jackson said. "And a little help from me. People like them make mistakes and they collect friends who look away. I make sure they don't."
He was ruthless in a way that scared me. He would not let anyone threaten me. "You used me as bait," I said one night, hurt because I had felt like the fragile prize.
"No," he said. "You were never bait. You were a debt I wanted to repay. I couldn't stand thinking of you being hurt again."
We found threads linking Isabela and Grady to a woman called Amy—someone who fit the description the detectives had whispered about in our town. Amy had gone quiet and had been spotted abroad. She had bank accounts that had swallowed millions, then vanished.
"This Amy—she played the role of you at the crash," Jackson said. "But not perfectly. The eyes told the lie."
"Who hired her?" I asked, vision thin.
"Someone who wanted you gone," Jackson said. "Someone who wanted Isabela gone, too."
He worked without fluff. I watched him order people around like a conductor and I felt something dangerous bloom—relief that had the shape of love. The more I saw him act, the more I believed.
"Are you ready to hear the ugly truth?" he asked one night.
"Tell me," I said. I had learned there were only two ways: bury it or make it live and breathe in daylight.
"Your mother," Jackson said. The name dropped and the room tilted.
I shut my eyes. I had always suspected someone had pushed harder than strangers. My mother had been absent at crucial times but she had done nothing that seemed like a crime. "No," I whispered.
"Not a final no," Jackson said. "But Amy had calls to a number traced back to a place your mother had ties to overseas. There are gaps. People move money. People hide."
I wanted to slam the table, to tear the walls. "If that's true—"
"I will find out," Jackson said, and here his voice was not patient. It was a blade. "But I will do it with you. Always with you."
We dug. There were late nights and small lies and men who smelled of money and told us nothing. One night Ellis came back and said, "Jackson, there's a ledger tied to a shell company in Y-country. It was used to pay Amy."
"Who's the beneficiary?" Jackson asked.
"A name masked, but records point to a company owned by… a trustee with connections to your mother's company," Ellis said.
I sat numbly. My throat closed. "Why would Mom—"
"Because money can hold a person like a noose," Jackson said. "Some people sell their children to keep a name."
We confronted my mother with proof. I walked into the room like a soldier who'd put on lipstick. She looked at me and saw a girl she had raised for small reasons and abandoned for agreements.
"Journee," she breathed.
"Why?" I asked. My voice did not waver.
She covered her mouth. For a long time her eyes were maps of regret and then she said, "I did what I had to. They said if I refused, you would lose everything another way. If I did this, I could keep you safe from worse."
"How is putting me in a cell protecting me?" I asked. "How is turning me into a murderer protecting me?"
She fell apart. The story came out in ragged pieces. Amy had been hired by people who promised my mother a way back to security—promises she had taken like a drowning person takes a rope, not seeing the knots.
"I thought if you were gone, they would leave us alone," she sobbed. "They didn't. I was wrong."
The revelation was a kind of poison and a kind of relief. I had been held down by one set of lies and then the next. Jackson held me after the interrogation and I let myself be small and quiet for the first time in years.
"Justice is not revenge," Jackson said after I slept for hours. He sounded more tired than I had ever heard him. "But they will answer."
We brought everything to light. Jackson pushed his cards into play. He leaked the ledger to the press and to prosecutors. He handed Ellis over evidence and the dark webs of influence started to unwind. Bank accounts frozen, phone records subpoenaed—Grady and the small circle that had made my life a ruin were unmasked. Isabela's managers who had covered the tracks were exposed. My name—Journee Peterson—began to clear in the court of public opinion and in real law, too. Old evidence re-opened. Tape footage from three years ago revealed a white car at the scene. New analysis exposed discrepancies in witness statements. A witness recanted.
"I told you," Jackson said one night, eyes soft as the pillow. "You are not what they said."
"Neither are you," I said. "You are a terrible, dangerous man with knights at his call."
He laughed softly. "I am dangerous for people who hurt you. But for you—"
He went on one knee in the middle of our small room one night, not because he needed to show me off but because of the way his hands shook.
"Will you marry me?" he asked.
I had learned to be cautious of roses and diamonds and sudden offers. But his eyes were steady. This proposal was not a display; it was a soft concession.
"I trust you," I said. "I trust us. Yes."
We kept fighting, but now the fight had a purpose beyond survival. We were pushing to give me my name back. The fight meant we had to face public stares and whispers. Reporters circled. Anonymous accounts screamed that Jackson was buying the system. I sat in hearings, chest bare under a blouse, and watched prosecutors listen. I testified. The truth was not pretty, but it was solid and it had legs.
"People will still hurt you," Jackson warned one night. "They will try to use every scrap of you."
"I know," I said.
He held my hand like a promise. "Then let them try. I will be loud."
The trial was a slow burn. Evidence that had once been buried was pulled up and laid bare. A woman who had posed as me was found and brought under pressure. She broke. In the stand she admitted to being paid to act like me—Amy was a name she'd been given. Her shooter was not me; she had been paid to be in a car that night.
A dam broke that day. I felt it flood inward and outward. I had my freedom now, or at least a new kind.
"You're free," Jackson said after the judge read the verdict that exonerated me. He put my hand to his heart and then to his mouth.
"No," I said. "Free is different. I'm not the same person who was taken."
"You're better," he said.
People cheered outside the courthouse. Cameras flashed. My mother watched with a face like cliff rock—eroded, but still there.
We didn't seek vengeance anymore, not in the way that tears us. The law took care of men like Grady and his fellows. Isabela's image was shredded and she left town. She might claw back a life someday, but that life would be different.
Jackson did not bask in it. He packed me blood oranges—five hundred pounds delivered like a ridiculous apology turned feast—and we shared them with neighbors and old enemies who had been kind. He took care of the messy work: lawyers, accounts, quiet meetings with prosecutors. He never made me feel like a trophy. He made me feel like a person who could open jars and drive a battered e-bike that hummed again.
One evening, we walked to the park where the two of us had once sat under a frozen tree and eaten candy from a tin. I reached into my pocket and found a single strawberry candy, wrapped in papery pink. Jackson had carried a tin since the night he first saw me in the car.
"You remember," he said.
"Of course," I said.
We sat. He took my hand.
"You didn't just get justice," he said. "You got a life. You got me, badly behaving, forever."
I looked at him and then at the candy. The sugar tasted like the summer of my childhood and like the cold street I had once fled. The tastes braided together.
"Promise me something," I said.
"What?"
"Promise you'll be the kind of dangerous that softens the world, not breaks it."
He smiled, and there was danger in it but no hunger. "I promise."
We kissed, a slow thing with blood oranges and sugar and the honest ache of two people who had been forged by winter.
Later, when the lights were off and my scars were still there, Jackson came to my bed and set a tiny plate on my nightstand. On it were one strawberry candy and one small slice of blood orange.
"For the girl who saved me," he said.
I put the candy to my lips, tasted the sugar, and then handed the orange slice to him.
"For the man who kept his sword sheathed until it had to be used," I said.
He ate, and I lay with my head hooked under his arm. The city outside was loud and messy and merciless sometimes. Inside, a small house creaked. Two people were alive in it, not perfect, not unscathed, but together.
"Will we be okay?" I whispered.
"We will be more than okay," he said. "We will be dangerous to anyone who dares hurt us again. We will be kind to people who have nothing. And we will hold each other when we are small."
I closed my eyes, the taste of candy and orange in my mouth. I thought of the long road—the holes, the lies, the prison nights—and I felt the past settle like dust. It did not go away, but it no longer had the power to erase me.
"You picked a big job," I murmured.
"I picked you," he said.
Outside, a siren wailed and then faded—nothing I could not handle now. I reached up and kissed his cheek.
"If you ever leave," I said, smiling, "I will chase you like a madwoman."
He tightened his arm around me.
"Try me," he whispered.
I drifted to sleep with his breath warm in my hair and the tiny tin of strawberry candy on the nightstand—a small, stubborn thing that promised sweetness even after storms.
The End
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