Billionaire Romance12 min read
"Healer in the Billionaire's House — I Broke In and Stayed"
ButterPicks15 views
"I need the healer in City A."
I said it into the phone while I climbed out of the racing car, one hand on my suitcase.
"Great. I'll come as soon as I'm done," my brother Carver said.
"I said no," I replied coldly, and shut the door on him.
I don't need pity. I don't need an escort. I need a cure.
When I landed in A City, Dean Sanchez — my loyal driver-bodyguard — was waiting like a worried ghost.
"Boss, you're finally here," he said.
"Where's my place?" I asked, taking the suitcase back.
"It's ready. The style fits you," Dean answered, careful.
"Bring my things up. Don't follow me," I said.
He blinked, handed me a key, and watched me walk away. He always thinks I'm fragile. Good. Keep thinking that.
At the top of the city, the restaurant called Lark had a private table for people who had money and taste and secrets. I showed my card and sat by the window.
A man at the far corner stared. He was handsome, and I told myself to keep my head turned. He didn't take his eyes off me. He had the kind of face that could ruin a life or save one.
He left when I did. I felt him pull on something inside me that I had learned to clamp shut. I smiled like someone who can break anything — because chances were I would.
That evening I logged into the hacker forum from a burner phone. The account name: "FeatherGod." The message feed buzzed with my post: looking for the healer who made the herbal book famous.
Someone answered the thread. No one had proof. No one had led me close.
Then, in the auction house the next day, the last lot was the prize I had been hunting for: The Herbal Compendium, a hand-written book lost for one hundred years. The starting bid was a billion.
A man in the top box dropped ten billion like a coin.
I didn't care about the price. I cared that the book might lead me to the healer.
Later, Dean told me who the buyer was.
"Marcus Garnier," he said. "Garnier Group. The man owns half the city."
"Good," I said. "Keep an eye on him."
I sat back and watched my plan move like a slow blade. I had two years left on the worst nights. That was the math on my body. The book said true healers could push back time for a person, but I had no proof. My grandmother had left me legends and a list of herbs. That was all. People with money and power held pages; I had no pages, only my life and the stubbornness to steal what I needed.
At the university, I joined the traditional medicine program, as quiet as a shadow. People called me cold. The soldier-turned-instructor who ran the summer training was Marcus Garnier.
He stepped onto the stage on the first day and the room fell silent. "I will expect discipline," he said. He scanned the crowd and his gaze fell on me like a gentle claim.
"Can I sit with you?" he asked me once, when the training break let us breathe.
"Sure," I said.
We ate in silence. He gave me a small thing the next day — a pink brooch he had bought at the auction. "For you," he said.
"Not needed," I said, and then I held it because it was an offered thing and I was not a thief of people's kindness without returning it in some way.
He watched me during training. He would step forward when the sun hit the field and put his body between me and the heat. It made the other students whisper; it made my world tilt.
"I don't like him staring at you like that," one girl hissed. "He belongs to the world."
"I like the world," he said to me softly once, when we were alone.
"Then you can keep it."
When the big sleepwalk of the army training moved into special drills, they pulled a hundred students out for something special. I was chosen. I laughed to myself. Luck or skill — either way, it meant more eyes on me.
Later that night, I couldn't sleep. I used the dark to go somewhere I'd been practicing to go for months: Marcus Garnier's house. I wanted to test the security, or maybe test myself. The house was a fortress of lights and glass. I moved like the wind. I found a side door that didn't scream. The bracelet on my wrist opened the lock like a thief's key.
I was inside before I smelled the alarm.
A man moved in the shadows. He was not yet angry. He smiled — a dangerous smile.
"I thought you'd be harder to find," he said.
"You think I'm looking for sport?" I said.
He shrugged. Then he pressed a finger to a small pad on the wall and the lights came up.
It was him, of course. Marcus Garnier. The room felt smaller under his gaze. He let me run and then stopped me. He took the face mask from my head.
"You," he said, like he had solved a puzzle. "It's you."
"Yes," I said. I had not planned for him to recognize me. I had not planned for the thing that happened next: his hand on my wrist to take my pulse.
"You're sick," he said.
"You think so?" I asked.
He did something I did not expect. He closed his eyes and then, with a quiet voice, said, "I can help. I can extend you — maybe for up to ten years. But it will not be a cure."
The room tightened. My bones went cold and warm at the same time.
"I am Marcus Garnier," he told me. "I was at the auction for that book. I am...the healer people whisper about."
I laughed. "You? The city man? The Garnier who industrialized the coast?"
He blinked like the words had weight. "I studied," he said. "I did more than buy companies. I learned medicine. I grew up hungry. I can give time."
I wanted to ask how. I wanted to ask why. I wanted to ask if the book he had had any real power. He saw the questions on my face and answered before I could settle them.
"The book helps," he said. "But it's patience and method. I can push back a clock. I will not make you immortal. I will make you survive longer."
"How much longer?" I asked.
"Ten years at best," he said. "But I need cooperation. You will need to stay where I can watch you."
I should have said no. I should have taken the book and run. Instead I saw something I had not let in for years: a man who looked at me not like I was a case, not like a project, but like someone to keep.
"Room?" I asked. That was simpler.
He smiled, and for the first time since I turned cold, the smile did not hurt.
"Move in," he said.
The next morning, Carver cornered me in the hall. "You moved in with him?"
"Yes," I said. "He offered and he knows what he is doing."
"He's dangerous," Carver said, voice low. "He has power. Please be careful."
"Already knew that."
I started to live in his house. It was strange. The rooms were clean, the food was good, the shoes were ordered; there was a garden with herbs my grandmother would have nodded at. Marcus made soup. He made me eat. He made me sleep. He found a weakness and he filled it like an artist fixing a broken pot.
He also made a demand: "Tell me everything about the Compendium."
I did not trust him completely, but he had given me a choice. "We work together," I said. "You have the book. I have the family knowledge. We make a plan."
He nodded.
At night he probed my body with hands that were gentle and strong. "I'm going to need to give you treatments," he said. "Not all of them are medicine. Some are training."
"Then train me," I said.
In the quiet between treatments, we argued. He told me stories: he had been a soldier, then a student, then a man who had learned how to use money to buy time for medicine. I told him about the lab nights with my grandmother's papers, about the doses and the virus that had been injected into me as a child by people who wanted a weapon.
"You don't have to be brave alone," he said one night. "We will find who made it."
"Why help me?" I asked.
He did not look away. "Because you matter," he said. "Because I owe a debt."
That was the first real thing I felt without a shield: the wish to be kept.
Life moved like waves. At school, the girl Eleanor Kato — jealous and sharp — tried to use a forum post to make a public scandal about me and Marcus. She wanted to humiliate me: say I had seduced the instructor, call me a gold-digger. I let it hang. I restored the post after she'd deleted it. People needed a story to fight. They chose me. Marcus folded his lips and did nothing public. He did not need to fight her.
One night Carver came to Marcus's door and nearly tore it from the frame. "You touched my sister," he snarled.
"I am treating her," Marcus said calmly. Then he added quietly, "She's not your thing to own."
Carver looked at him and something inside shifted. He sat down and swallowed his fury.
Marcus gave me night treatments and I gave him answers. He told me the book had notes that matched the herbs my grandmother loved. "I bought the book because I thought it was a treasure," he said. "I did not expect to meet the person it belonged to."
For a time we practiced like that: he with his sleek tools and old books, and I with my hands from the dirt and my grandmother's hands in my mind.
Word leaked that I was moving in. The university gossiped and some students plotted. Eleanor tried to force me into a fight during training. A woman named Marta — a good fighter who had always been proud — met me in the ring and underestimated me. She learned she couldn't count on the old scripts. She spoke to me after: "Someone put me up to it." I shrugged.
"Who?" she asked.
"Someone with sharp nails," I smiled. "No more."
Marta later came to me with an apology. "You fought clean," she said. "You make people like me forget to be mean."
I accepted. It was a small victory.
Marcus watched all of it with a strange tenderness. Sometimes he laughed at the world with me. Sometimes he grew dark and said, "I will fight anyone who hurts you."
"Then fight quietly," I told him. "Leave storms to me."
He had a strange family. His grandmother said I must be his wife. She announced this to the world. He pretended to push back and then realized she was right: the fast talk would make us safe. We let the fake story fly.
At night he would check my pulse, and the lines on his face softened when I slept. "I can give you ten years," he said once with the kind of certainty that breaks hearts. "But the last thing I want is to buy time only to watch you waste it hiding."
"I don't plan to waste it," I said. "I plan to learn."
"Then learn with me," he whispered.
So I learned medicine with him. I read the book. We read it in the garden where the air smelled like the valley my grandmother loved. The Compendium had names for plants I'd only seen in my childhood. It held ways to combine elixirs and treatments. It had mistakes and odd notes from old hands, but more importantly, it had the structure for things Marcus had only dreamed of.
One night, Marcus told me about a lab across the border where the first batch of the virus had been tested on children. "We will find who did this," he said. "And we will make them pay with truth."
The search pushed our days forward. We set traps that were small and smart. Carver took on part of the hunt and found old ledgers. Dean hacked into safe lines. Marcus used money. I used memory.
The healer's work was not only herbs. It was a stubborn refusal to accept death when someone with years left could live.
We had nights that were like nothing and nights that changed me. He leaned his head on my shoulder to sleep; I learned to fold my body so it fit his. We argued, we traded secrets, and one winter afternoon he found a seed in my pocket that came from my grandmother's garden.
"Plant it," he said, pointing to the pot on his balcony with its narrow sun.
I planted it. We watched it grow.
It was a small picture but it became our proof. The seed pushed life out of the soil the way he pushed life into my body. He smiled like a person who had found family.
Eleanor and her friends faded back into small lives. Marcus kept watch over the Compendium and would not let the book out of his hands for long. He asked me to help him choose what to try next.
"Do you trust me?" he asked one night, pressing my hand.
"Trust is a tool," I said. "It must be used."
"Then use it on me."
I did.
We made a plan to find the men who made the virus. It would be slow. It would be dangerous. We both knew it. Marcus had the money; I had the reason. Together we had purpose.
Months passed. The treatments made my worst nights fewer. My cough came less. The dark days of panic shortened. I could not say we had a cure — Marcus had been honest — but that winter he gave me months of breathing. I began to study like a person on a mission. My head filled with names and herbs and the building stones of medicine.
On the day the seed bloomed into a single stubborn white flower, Marcus sat beside me, thumb tracing the thin stem. "You grew this," he said.
"You helped," I corrected.
He leaned close, voice small. "We will find them," he said. "And then we will make sure nobody else has to be hunted like you were."
I looked at the white bloom. I remembered my grandmother's voice teaching me how to strip a leaf. The medicine I learned tasted like dirt and sunlight. I tasted hope.
"You'll keep your word," I said.
He smiled, and at last I let myself believe that a man with a fortune could be a man with a heart that did what was right.
We did not finish the hunt in a page. We did not find all the answers in one night. But in the months that followed, we made a life where fear did not rule. I moved from the shadow of theft and secret to a place where my days were full of study and small joys — rice porridge at dawn and healing herbs drying on racks.
Carver married a bitterness into care and learned to sleep when I was safe. Dean learned to cook because Marcus insisted. Eleanor apologized one winter when her father lost money; she wrote a note that said: "You were braver than I was." I kept the note.
The Compendium stayed on Marcus's table and we copied the inks into our notebooks. Marcus worked like a man who had stolen time for himself as well as others. He sometimes burned the midnight oil until we both felt hollow. We argued about pace and patient rights. I learned to say "enough" and to rest.
One night, as rain hammered the glass and the city lights blurred into long streaks, Marcus put his hand on my face. His skin was warm. "I promised you ten years," he said. "I will give you what I can, and then some. But more than that, I promise to find the people who did this."
"And if you can't?" I asked.
He narrowed his eyes like he would an enemy. "Then we will build a future that makes those men feel small," he said.
I laughed. "That's not a promise," I said.
He kissed the corner of my mouth. "It's a plan."
Years compressed into months and then into steady days. Patients came to us at first for small things. People said Marcus had the hands of a healer and the money of a king. They were right. We wrote new notes in the margins of the Compendium and left them for whoever came later.
When the first man responsible for the virus fell into our sight — a doctor who had signed papers and never had to see the faces — we handed him evidence to the public and watched as the city that protected him turned on him. The man was arrested. He listened as the city named him and his work.
It was not revenge that satisfied me. It was a clean ledger. A man who had been shielded had to face truth. We watched.
One clear morning, I walked with Marcus to the balcony. The white flower still stood. I took its stem between two fingers and snapped off one petal. I tucked it into the pocket of his jacket.
"Why keep that?" he asked.
"Because my grandmother planted that seed in a place she loved," I said. "And because you promised to stay, even when the math said otherwise."
He slipped the petal near his heart and smiled like a man who had been given back his best part.
"We have years now," he said.
"One day at a time," I answered.
We kept working. We kept learning. We kept the Compendium safe and copied. I enrolled in medical courses and wrote my name in margins. Marcus built clinics and refused to profit from the poor.
On the day I finally read a line in the Compendium that matched my grandmother's ink — a sentence that connected the herb pattern to a small hope — I looked up at him and said, "We have a map."
He took my hand. "Then let's follow it."
That was the new promise. Not a cure in one night. Not a dream of immortality. A plan made of small steps and stubborn care.
I planted another seed in the pot the next spring. Marcus watched, and when it sprouted, he laughed out loud like someone who had won a war without shooting a shot.
"You're smiling," I said.
"You made me want to stay," he said.
I leaned my head on his shoulder. "You always had a choice."
"So did you," he replied. "You chose to live."
We had fought the city and the men under its skirts. We had given away the Compendium's pages to scholars who could use them. We had let the book become a tool, not a weapon.
And when the last piece of the puzzle fell and the lab was exposed, we sat together and watched the world name the guilty. It didn't fix my body. It didn't make every night safe. But it made the city cleaner for the people who had been used.
The white flower in the pot grew more petals. Once petals fell, I picked them up and put them into Marcus's hand.
"Keep them," I said. "They are a ledger of small things."
He kept them. He kept me. We kept the book open and the clinic doors open.
Sometimes I think back to the night I broke into his house. I had meant to steal a book. I had meant to wrestle fate with my own hands.
Instead, I found a man who could not be only a type. I found a healer who could be a lover and a friend and a stubborn protector. I found a life I could learn to live.
At the edge of the balcony, above the city we both held with new softness, I pulled the bracelet off my wrist and clicked it against his coat.
"Keep this," I said. "Like the petal. Like the seed. A thing to remember."
He pocketed it. He kissed my knuckles. "We have time," he said.
We did not argue about how much. We promised to use it well.
When the hospital next called to say a child had come in with a shadowed virus, Marcus and I walked into the room and took our places. My hands shook once, and then they were steady.
"This is what we do," he said.
"One day at a time," I said.
I pressed the glass of the IV into place and smiled. The child's mother looked at me like a wild thing and then like someone who could trust. I felt the line between being the patient and being the healer thin out.
Outside, the city kept moving. The Compendium stayed open on a table. The white flower on the balcony bent toward the sun.
I had stolen a book. I had stolen time. I had stolen more than I expected.
But the last thing I stole was a small future: a life with a man who knew how to give time and a woman who had once believed she had none.
We will take each day as it comes.
And when a new child walks into the clinic years from now, they will find a shelf with that old Compendium, a pot with a white flower, and on the wall a simple sign.
"One day at a time."
The End
— Thank you for reading —