Chapter 120 CHAPTER 120
High school crush
Julian moved to the window and looked out over the city. It felt dangerous and raw, as though something was always about to explode. He hated that feeling. He hated that it had followed Ares and dragged his mother into it. He turned back when he heard the quiet sound of shoes on linoleum.
Chloe stood in the doorway, as if she had appeared from nowhere. She wore a long dark coat, collar turned up against the cold, and a cigarette smoldered between her fingers. The smoke hung over her. Her face was partly shadowed, but her eyes were clear and bright in their way, sharp as glass.
Julian’s lips thinned. He watched her, assessing, and for a sliver of time he remember the Tv footage OG Chloe’s presence at Deez, the way she’d orchestrated fear until the police came.
She didn’t see him approach. He stepped into the corridor with easy, slow movements. She exhaled, watching the smoke curl into the ceiling.
“Done smoking?” Tessa said, voice cool and crisp. “Maybe now you can help out instead of standing there.”
Chloe’s mouth curved into a smile that said she wasn’t ready for trouble. “I can stand where I like.” She glanced at Lady Bianca, then at Julian. But she kept looking past him, focusing on Lady Bianca instead. She took the cigarette from between her fingers and crushed it with the heel of her shoe, as though she wanted the action to look casual.
Julian didn’t make a scene. He had learned that Chloe craved dramatic scenes. He also knew she thrived in the silence afterward. He stepped closer to the bed, knelt so he was closer to Lady Bianca’s level, and kept his speaking low and grounded. “Mom,” he said. “Please be fine.”
Bianca blinked, a small worried frown tugging at her brow. “Julian—is Ares…?”
“He’s on a flight back here,” Julian answered. “He had to go to New York. He’ll be back soon.”
At that, Chloe’s head tilted, faint amusement playing across her face. She inhaled again in a way that seemed to underline the small cruelty of being present. Julian felt the pressure of her eyes as if they weighed. He let them weigh. He kept his calm.
“A flight? What happened to the private jet?” Lady Bianca asked.
“Nothing.” Julian replied.
He rose and gave Tessa a look that held both instruction and gratitude. “Stay with her. I’ll be back after I check on the children.”
Tessa nodded. She watched him go with a small, bright fear in her eyes.
Julian walked past Chloe with politeness he’d refined over years of navigating other people’s problems. Chloe didn’t look at him as he passed; she watched the sleeping woman and then the hospital hallway, as if mapping exits she might need to take.
Outside the automatic doors the night air felt cold enough to clear thoughts. Julian’s phone buzzed—one text, Ares’s name at the top, the message was short: Flight delayed. Boarding soon. Call when you can. Julian thumbed a reply quickly, letting Ares know where his children were and that Bianca was stable.
He climbed into his car and drove back to the mansion slowly, the city lights blurring into streaks of caution. Dorcas met him at the gate, face grave but composed. She guided him silently to the nursery. The children were breathing softly, tucked in as if protected by something larger than a roof and a nanny, a small private peace.
Julian sat for a long moment on the nursery bench, watching Beauty’s lashes flutter, Pretty’s small mouth part in sleep, Jamal’s shoulder rise in even time, Kamal’s fist curled by his cheek.
He stayed there until the clock rolled toward the hour when flights left for Asia. He dressed slowly in a dark coat, thoughts already assembling a route. He had one last check: the CCTV footage playback on his phone, a habit that had become protection. It showed nothing threatening.
At the airport, Ares moved with the impatient efficiency of someone who had learned the language of departures. There was a tightness to him that made him look younger and older at the same time: younger in the leap of muscle under his shirt when he hurried, older in the lines that had been written by fights and sleepless fatherhood.
He paused by the gate and watched people: a woman kissing a husband goodbye, an old man arguing with a ticket clerk about a lost boarding pass, the brief, universal choreography of people moving their lives between places. Then he saw her like a flash of light falling into place.
She was leaning against a pillar, hair turned to soft gold in the airport lights, the kind of effortless beauty that looked like it belonged to someone who had been painted and left in the sun to shine. Julian might have straightened if he’d seen her first, Ares might have stopped time. The memory of a teenage crush—awkward, bruised, hopeful rose in him like a tide. He found himself walking toward her with the boyish suddenness of someone who had not stopped hoping.
She looked up as his shadow fell across the tiles. Their eyes met, recognition catching, and then her smile broke like an easy sunrise.
“Ares?” she said, as if saying his name could stitch the years back into a single moment.
“Hi, Lila,” he said, the name landing with a soft weight. “You look—” He stopped, because the words the twenty year old would have used were unnecessary now. “You look beautiful.”
She laughed, a sound that was both surprised and pleased. “So do you. Still the same stubborn reckless face.”
They hugged, brief and careful, like friends reconnecting after a long exam of life. There was something simple in the gesture that steadied him in the way nothing else had for days.
“Are you flying to Tokyo?” she asked, slipping easily into conversation like she had all the time in the world.
“Yeah,” he said. “Work. Family.” The word family landed oddly heavy for him, threading the edges of a long exhaustion.
She tilted her head. “I’m on the same flight. Business, too.” Her voice held a caramel calm. “Seat nine-A. I’m supposed to be stranded in nine-B, but maybe we can sit together?”
Ares’s mouth quirked. “We… were always shifted to the same desk in class. Maybe the universe does have a sense of humor.”
They moved through the boarding queue together, sliding into the ritual of traveling as if it hadn’t been interrupted by weeks of danger and faint bruises. When the gate agent scanned their passes she chuckled and gave them adjacent seats with a conspiratorial wink.
Ares felt something like relief settle in the hollow of his chest. Across the tarmac, the plane waited patient and indifferent, engines humming like a heartbeat. He had a seat and a companion who had once been a boy’s idea of perfect, and for a heartbeat the war of the past days paused.
He and Lila took their seats, luggage tucked above, the cabin lights dimming into that small, governed hush that made it possible to breathe. The attendants smiled through practiced calm, the safety video played on a loop, and around them the small private universe of an airplane settled for hours of travel.
Ares buckled his seatbelt and let his head lean back against the shell. He met Lila’s eyes, and they exchanged a small, private smile, the kind that carried a thousand unspoken apologies and the quiet, hopeful stabs of a new beginning.
Outside, the runway lights blinked a slow signal to the horizon. Inside, four rows back in a nursery that would go quiet until his return, Julian watched over the sleeping children like a sentinel who had taken his post for the night.
The aircraft doors closed with a soft finality. The engines wound to a deeper hum. Ares felt the plane lift, the city tilting away beneath them, and his throat tightened with the pull of what he was leaving and the weight of what he had to return to.
They were seated together as the world thinned int
o altitude and time, and for now, that was where the chapter ended, on the seat.