The Billionaire He Pretended Not to Be Chapter 05
They locked Leo away inside the estate. Santoro’s engagement drew closer by the day, and the Romano Family had no patience left for his defiance.
Curtains drawn tight, doors bolted shut, Leo stared fixed at his screen, scrambling for any way to
send a message to Autumn.
Every attempt went unanswered. Autumn had clearly cut all contact with him.
This time, he’d crossed far too far over the line.
“It’s fine. Autumn’s just being silly,” he muttered to soothe himself. “She’ll realize she can’t survive without me soon enough. She’ll crawl back like she always does.”
Even so, a gnawing unease coiled tighter in his chest as each hour slipped by.
That restlessness peaked the second David, his advisor, called.
“I told her everything you asked me to pass along.”
Leo let out a heavy sigh, leaning back and massaging his throbbing temples.
“Is she still throwing a fit?”
David fell silent for several long beats before he spoke.
“She’s gone.”
“We combed every mile of the whole city. Not a single trace of her anywhere.”
Silence swallowed the room. Leo’s grip tightened until his knuckles whitened around the phone. Under the dim lamp light, all color drained from his face.
His throat locked up tight. For a heartbeat, he couldn’t process the words.
…What did you just say?”
1
Two full weeks passed, and Leo received zero updates on Autumn’s whereabouts.
The Romano bloodline had never cared much for Autumn to begin with. A few days later, on the old Don’s orders, they abandoned the search entirely. No leads, no clues left behind.
In their world, nothing lasted forever aside from profit. The engagement announcement had gone
public, irreversible now-Leo was expected to comply without question.
But just days before the scheduled wedding, their private group chat exploded with frantic
messages.
Leo refused to show up to the ceremony.
A splitting headache crashed over David instantly.
By the time he rushed over, Leo had already taken multiple hard slaps to the face. The Romano Family had always coddled him, rarely raising their voices at him before this.
Now their patience had run completely dry.
No matter what threats or pleas they threw at him, Leo refused to back down.
The wedding had to be postponed, and Leo ended up admitted to the hospital.
“Didn’t everyone claim she was nothing more than dead weight?” David drawled lazily.
Leo looked pale and worn out, paying him no mind at all. He twisted the plain band ring on his finger and offered a half-hearted explanation.
“Legally speaking, Autumn is my family. She has no right to leave without my permission.”
The unspoken subtext hung thick in the air: he had no intention of letting this rest.
David parted his lips ready to scoff, only to clamp them shut again the moment he saw the raw look
on Leo’s face.
He couldn’t wrap his head around it. Did Leo even love her? It sure didn’t seem like it.
If he truly cared that deeply, he never would’ve pulled off what he’d done that night.
David still carried the memory of Autumn’s hollow, shattered eyes back at the club even he’d felt a flicker of pity for her.
“So you plan to hold off the wedding until you track her down?”
Leo offered no reply.
The Santoro clan endured all this chaos solely because their daughter was genuinely head over heels for Leo.
He would marry her eventually, David had never once doubted that truth
Even two years later, with no word of Autumn surfacing anywhere, David still clung to that certainty.
Just as everyone wrote her off as lost to the wind forever-
Santoro called his line.
A sharp gasp crackled over the speaker.
“David.”
“Leo found her.”
“He says he’s bringing her back to Chicago.”
