Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 276

Chapter 264.Cornered.

LOGAN

My lawyer told me about the indictment timeline on a Tuesday. I don’t remember much of what he said after the word imminent.

“Days, not weeks,” he said. “Logan, I need you to hear me. You cannot do anything that looks like a flight risk. You cannot make contact with anyone connected to this case outside of formal channels. You especially cannot…”

I stopped listening somewhere around there.

I had built everything. I returned to this thought the way I’d been returning to it for weeks, the only thought that still made sense to me, the only ground that still felt solid. The company. The name. A son who was, by every legal document that mattered, still mine, for now, before whatever was coming arrived and took even that.

Before they take him from me. This was the thought that finally broke through everything else, sitting alone in the apartment with my lawyer’s warnings still hanging unheeded in the air. They were going to indict me. They were going to take the company, eventually, take my freedom, take every careful thing I’d built across thirty-four years of believing control was simply a matter of wanting it badly enough.

I was not going to let them take Nick without one more moment that belonged to me alone.

I knew about the picnic because I had always known Nick’s schedule, even now, even though lawyers and supervised visitation orders and a Mrs. Peterson who had started watching me with something closer to fear than the careful neutrality she used to manage

I did not call ahead. I did not go through counsel. I did not do any of the so-called careful and correct things my lawyer would have insisted on if I’d given him the chance to insist.

I drove there myself.

The park was full of the ordinary texture of a Saturday; families and dogs. The unhurried noise of people who had nowhere they needed to be.

ľ

I found the gathering quickly. I had always been good at finding things I’d decided to look for.

Sedona was there. Her parents. Dante, looking healed now, the bandage gone from his forearm, laughing at something with the easy physical confidence I had once, briefly, envied without admitting it to myself. Cameron, watching everything the way Cameron always watched everything.

And Nick.

He was running with another boy, Drew, I assumed, the boy from the brief encounter Catherine had mentioned, both of them chasing something across the grass, Nick’s laugh carrying across the open space in a register I hadn’t heard from him in longer than I wanted to calculate.

I walked toward them.

13

Comered Byan-

Hfelt the shift in the group before anyone said a word, the specific recalibration of a gathering noticing an intrusion, bodies angling, conversations stopping mid-sentence. Cameron saw me first. I watched his expression go from open to completely closed in the space of one second, the specific stillness I had learned, across seventeen months, to recognize as Cameron Preston preparing to act.

“Logan.” Sedona’s voice was calm.

Already moving toward Nick. Body first. The maternal instinct was overriding everything else before her mind had caught up.

“I just want to see him. That’s all. I’m not here to cause a problem.”

“You can’t be here,” Sedona said. “You know you can’t be here. This isn’t a scheduled…”

“He’s my son,” I said. The words came out louder than I intended, sharper, the careful, contained version of myself I’d performed for thirty-four years, finally, completely, failing to hold its shape. “I am allowed to see my own son in a public park.”

“Logan.” Cameron’s voice now, low, positioning himself slightly between the rest of the group and me with the specific economy of a man who had clearly thought through exactly this scenario in advance. “You need to leave. Right now. Before this becomes something with consequences neither of us wants today.”

“Consequences.”

“They’re coming for everything, Cameron.” The laugh that came out of him was wrong. Sharp-edged. Nothing like a real one. “You think I don’t already understand consequences?”

The company, my freedom, every single thing I’ve built, and you’re standing here telling me I can’t even. look at my own son in a public park before they take that too.”

Nick had stopped running.

I saw him across the grass, frozen, Drew beside him with the same stillness, both boys watching the adults with the specific wide-eyed alertness of children who understood, without needing the details explained, that something was very wrong.

“Dad?” Nick’s voice small and uncertain.

Something in me cracked at the sound of it, not softened, not steadied. Cracked further, the last careful structure I’d been holding together finally gave way entirely.

“Nick,” I said. I started toward him. “Come here. I just want to talk to you for a minute.”

“Logan, stop.” Sedona’s voice, sharper now, real fear underneath the careful control she’d maintained until this exact second. She moved between Nick and me. “You don’t get to do this. Not here. Not like this

“I am his father,” I said again. Louder. The sentence I kept returning to was the only ground I still had left to stand on. The only fact nobody could yet strip away from me.

“That doesn’t stop because of a custody filing. That doesn’t stop because of whatever Reeve’s people have been building against me for months. I am still his father.”

Dante had moved now, too, positioning himself near Nick and Drew with the careful, deliberate calm of a man who understood exactly how volatile the next thirty seconds could become. Parker Preston was

2/3

Camered By

beside my own son’s mother now, his hand briefly on her shoulder, his expression the specific controlled Tury of a man deciding, in real time, exactly how far this was going to be allowed to go.

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