The Billionaire Who Forgot How to Love
Chapter 5: The Silence Between Heartbeats
The morning after she came back, Elias didn't know how to move.
Not physically—his body responded as usual, making coffee, flipping the lights, reading the news feeds like it was muscle memory.
But emotionally—he was standing on glass.
Every word he wanted to say felt too loud. Every motion felt too sharp, like it might pierce the fragile quiet between them.
Liv moved gently through the loft, brushing her hair into a loose braid, humming a melody that didn't ask for permission to exist.
She had come back, yes—but not completely.
And he didn't blame her.
"You look like you're waiting for the world to break," she said softly.
Elias looked up from his laptop. "Aren't we always?"
Liv didn't laugh. She just crossed the kitchen, picked up her mug, and said, "Some of us are just waiting for the world to hold."
He didn't know how to answer that.
So he didn't.
She let the silence stretch.
"I want to know more about you," she said, not looking at him.
"You already know everything that matters."
"I think I know everything you're ashamed of," she replied. "But that's not the same."
He closed the laptop.
Then nodded.
"Ask."
She blinked, surprised he gave in that easily.
"What was your first memory?"
He didn't expect the question.
"An orange plastic chair. Kindergarten. I was sitting alone. Everyone else was coloring. I was just... watching."
"Why?"
"I didn't know how to start."
Liv tilted her head. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."
"It's just a memory."
"It's the root," she whispered. "You've always been afraid to begin."
Elias didn't reply. He didn't need to.
Because something inside him cracked open, just a little.
That week, she stayed.
She cooked. Badly.
He burned toast. Twice.
They laughed in a way that didn't need repair.
Elias found himself watching her more than he used to—not to memorize her, but to understand what softness looked like.
She painted in the corner of the loft near the windows.
Mostly unfinished portraits. Mostly of him.
"You keep leaving my eyes blank," he said one evening.
She looked over her shoulder. "Because I don't know what you want to see yet."
But peace is never permanent.
And Elias felt it like a pulse under the skin—something was watching.
Not Derek. Not the people he'd struck his deal with.
This was something older.
Something he hadn't outrun in either life.
It started with a message.
Not digital.
Paper. Handwritten.
Folded and placed in his coat pocket at a café he hadn't been inside for months.
"You gave the wrong man your silence."
No name. No threat. Just a reminder.
That nothing stays buried.
Not when you've lived more than once.
Elias stared at the note long after the café emptied.
His mind ran through a hundred possibilities.
The old syndicate from his first life?
Someone who'd slipped through the cracks?
Or worse—someone from this life, piecing together the impossible?
He burned the note.
Not out of fear.
But respect.
Because whoever wrote it didn't need to threaten him.
They already knew where to hurt him.
That night, he returned to the loft with quieter steps.
Liv was sketching again. This time her own face. This time unfinished.
He kissed the top of her head.
She looked up. "Bad day?"
"Just ghosts."
She didn't push.
She just moved the sketchbook aside and laid her hand over his.
He wanted to tell her about the note. About the silence in his coat pocket. About the possibility that his carefully reconstructed life was beginning to unravel.
But she smiled like she trusted him.
And he couldn't bring himself to break that.
Not yet.
Not until he was sure who had written those words.
Because if it was who he feared…
It meant someone else had come back too.
The next morning, Elias left before sunrise.
He didn't wake Liv.
There was something unspoken between them still—too delicate to prod, too tender to define.
He made his way to an old server farm he'd used years ago—back when he was still a ghost in the systems of men who ruled the world.
There, in a room humming with electricity and dust, he ran the only query that mattered:
Handwriting analysis — Origin.
He uploaded the scanned note. Let the system dig.
An hour passed. Then another.
Finally, a result: 87% match to a name he hadn't seen since the life before this one.
Draven Vale.
It wasn't possible.
Draven had died. Or so he was told. Buried in an off-the-books operation tied to a scandal the world never got to read about. A man like Elias didn't forget a face like his.
But the system didn't lie.
If Draven was back, everything Elias had built—everything he loved—was on a ticking clock.
Back at the loft, Liv sat at Elias's desk, flipping through sketch paper and trying to fight the ache of being in a space built for someone who lived like a shadow.
She wanted to understand him.
She needed to.
A flicker on the corner of the desk caught her eye—a thin file half-tucked beneath a closed notebook. It wasn't hidden, not really. But it felt like something no one was supposed to see.
She hesitated.
Then reached for it.
Inside were clipped newspaper clippings—mostly obituaries. A few surveillance photos. Some handwritten notes in Elias's sharp, minimal script.
But one photo made her freeze.
It was her.
Taken two years ago.
She flipped the photo over.
On the back, written in Elias's hand:
"Spared. Why?"
The world tilted.
She closed the file, her breath trembling.
He had known her.
Before.
Before any of this.
Before them.
And he'd been watching.
Elias returned just after noon.
The air in the loft had changed. It wasn't colder. Just still.
Like a room waiting to be judged.
He found Liv in the center of the studio, the file in her hands.
She didn't look angry.
Just… broken.
"Why?" she asked quietly.
He didn't pretend not to understand.
He didn't lie.
"I didn't mean for you to find that."
"That's not an answer."
"I was trying to understand why you were spared. Back then. The explosion. The tunnel collapse. I saw the casualty list… and your name wasn't on it. You should've been gone."
"And instead you tracked me?"
"I watched," he admitted. "From a distance. You didn't know me. Not then. But I… I remembered you."
Her voice cracked. "You remembered me before you met me."
He nodded once. "And I told myself I'd never step into your life. Not unless you walked into mine."
She looked at him for a long time.
And then, quietly, she said, "You lied to yourself."
He didn't deny it.
Because love doesn't ask for permission. It just lives, in silence or in shadows.
And now, it had been dragged into the light.
Elias sat across from her. Not behind a wall of charm or intellect, not with any carefully crafted script.
Just him.
Raw. Scared. Real.
"I died," he said.
Liv blinked.
He continued, "Not just metaphorically. My first life—before this—ended in a hospital bed surrounded by nothing. I'd built companies. Made billions. Loved wrong. Chose worse. And when I died, there was no one beside me. Not even the woman I thought I was dying for."
He paused. Her eyes were on him, but she said nothing.
"I helped a woman," he said. "Old. Frail. She had fallen crossing the street. People just stepped around her. I picked her up. I didn't know who she was. I didn't care. But I helped her."
Liv's breath caught.
"She asked me what I wanted. Just one thing. I said nothing. But inside, I wished I could go back. Just once. Not to change the world. Just... to change myself."
He swallowed.
"She smiled. And I woke up twenty years earlier. Younger. Healthier. With everything I ever knew in my head."
Liv stared at him like he had stepped out of a myth.
"You're serious."
He nodded.
"You... were reborn?"
He let out a shaky breath. "I know how it sounds. But yes."
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because someone else is back too."
As if summoned by the weight of those words, the doorbell rang.
Elias stood. Liv didn't move.
He opened the door to find a plain black box on the mat.
No label. No name.
He brought it inside and opened it slowly.
Inside was a USB drive.
Only one word printed on a white label:
"Hello."
He connected it to his encrypted laptop, isolating it from all systems.
A video file auto-played.
The image blinked into clarity—grainy, low-lit.
A man in a chair.
Gray hair.
Sharp eyes.
Draven Vale.
He hadn't aged.
"Elias," the man said, his voice a slow razor. "If you're seeing this, it means the game is open again. I warned them you couldn't be kept in a box."
He smiled.
"But I'm not here to fight. Not yet. I'm here to remind you what we left behind. What we buried to buy our second chances."
He leaned forward.
"Do you remember the girl in Sarajevo? The one you saved... but didn't?"
Elias went cold.
Liv looked between them, confused.
Draven continued.
"She remembers you. And she's not as forgiving as I am."
The video cut to static.
Elias closed the lid slowly.
Liv spoke first.
"Who is he?"
"The man I left behind when I tried to become someone better."
She stared.
"And now?"
Elias looked up.
"Now he's come to collect."
Elias looked at the closed laptop like it might explode.
But the real detonation was already ticking—in Liv's eyes.
She stepped back, needing space, air, anything to make sense of what she'd just witnessed.
"Let me in," she said. Not loudly. Not angrily.
Just clear. Demanding in a way pain usually is.
"I have," Elias replied.
She shook her head. "You've let me orbit you. That's not the same. I can't build anything with a man who thinks love is a perimeter."
He stood still, that familiar ache pulling at him.
"I thought I was protecting you," he said.
"You don't protect people by hiding the fire," she replied. "You protect them by letting them help carry the water."
He didn't speak.
She crossed the room, standing toe-to-toe with him.
"Tell me everything. Or this—whatever this is—ends now."
His silence was the most honest thing he had left.
Finally, he said, "There's a file. Hidden server. Password only I know. I kept logs. Everything—Draven, Sarajevo, the girl. Every play we ran."
She folded her arms. "Then I want in. All the way. If I'm part of your life, I'm part of your war."
"You don't know what that means."
"I know exactly what it means," she said. "It means I stop wondering when you'll disappear again. It means I stand next to you, not behind you."
Elias stared at her like he was seeing her for the first time—not the woman he once studied from afar, not the sketch on a canvas, but the storm that could hold him steady.
"Okay," he whispered. "You're in."
That same day, his board of directors sent a request for an emergency call.
Elias knew why.
News was leaking.
A rival firm had acquired documents linking one of his shell companies to a weapons logistics fund in Eastern Europe—records that shouldn't exist. Unless someone wanted them to.
Unless Draven wanted them to.
He stood at the edge of a precipice:
Warn his investors and admit the past, risking the entire empire...
Or say nothing, shield Liv, and hope it's enough.
He opened a secure channel.
The board call blinked to life.
He didn't wear a suit. Didn't use his CEO voice.
Just Elias.
"I'm going to say something that may destroy everything," he said.
Faces blinked across the screen. Confusion. Concern.
"I built this empire on secrets. And one of those secrets has come back."
He gave them just enough.
Enough to spark panic. But not enough to get anyone killed.
He ended the call.
Turned to Liv.
And said, "Now they know."
"What happens next?" she asked.
He met her gaze.
"Now we find out what kind of man I've really become."
Two days later, Liv boarded a plane alone.
Not because she wanted to.
Because she needed to.
Elias had shown her the name: Leila Radic.
The girl from Sarajevo.
But she wasn't a girl anymore.
Now she was a myth whispered in intelligence circles—ghost, assassin, survivor. No one had photographic proof she existed. No one could say what side she belonged to.
Except Elias.
"She was collateral," he'd confessed. "We weren't meant to save her. But I did. And I left her in the hands of men who didn't deserve her silence."
So Liv went.
To find a woman who should be grateful.
And discovered a weapon honed by vengeance.
Leila met Liv in an abandoned chapel outside Prague.
Tall. Unblinking. Beautiful in the way fire is beautiful—because it does not apologize.
"You're his now," Leila said. Not a question.
"I'm trying to understand who he was."
Leila laughed. A single, bitter sound.
"He was a man who thought saving me meant owning my story."
Liv didn't flinch. "He regrets that."
"Regret doesn't unbury the dead."
They sat across from each other, candlelight flickering between them.
Liv chose her words carefully.
"You could've killed him already. But you haven't."
Leila tilted her head. "You think this is about revenge?"
"Isn't it?"
"No. This is about correction. Elias was given a second life. I want him to earn it."
"How?"
Leila smiled faintly. "By choosing something other than survival."
She slid a sealed envelope across the table.
"Give him this. When he reads it, he'll understand what's coming. And if he chooses wrong again, I won't need to find him. The world will."
Back in New York, Liv stood in Elias's study.
He opened the envelope slowly.
Inside: a photograph of Leila—sixteen, bruised, eyes defiant. And a note.
"I forgave you. Then I learned forgiveness means nothing to the dead."
Elias swallowed hard.
Liv stood by the window.
"She doesn't want to kill you," she said.
"I know."
"She wants you to change."
He looked at her.
"I already did."
"No," Liv whispered. "You just learned how to hide better."
And for the first time since he was given this second life, Elias Thorne wasn't sure he was the hero of his own story.