Owned In Silence
Tobin Leith was never supposed to survive the first week.
When his older brother's gambling debts spiral out of control, the Saal mafia syndicate comes to collect. They want collateral to keep on a leash until the debt is settled. Tobin volunteers before his brother can speak.
Emeric Saal, a dominant underworld boss, is cold, calculating, and bored by almost everything. He accepts the arrangement without emotion. Tobin is just a pawn housed in his guest wing under constant surveillance.
Except Tobin refuses to act like a hostage. He stays defiant. On the fourth night, Emeric catches him picking the lock on his office door with a fashioned tension wrench. Emeric simply sits down across from him, lights a cigarette, and says the words that change everything:
"I was wondering when you would try."
Emeric already knows the truth. Tobin is operating under a hidden identity, actively hunting for revenge. What begins as a volatile cat-and-mouse game quickly twists into a steamy, intense MM romance. Emeric, for the first time in years, is deeply interested in seeing what happens next.
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Chapter: CHAPTER 10: THE BREAKThe security breach turned out to be an inside job, a low-level staff member bought by a rival faction for an amount of money that Emeric described, with cold contempt, as insulting. Silas identified the man within twelve hours, the matter was handled in the basement level, and the estate returned to its routines with new encryption protocols on every electronic lock.But nothing returned to what it had been before the dark. Tobin felt it in the way Emeric looked at him across the breakfast table, a half-second longer than necessary. He felt it in the way their chess games had changed, each move carrying meanings that had nothing to do with strategy. The silence of the study had transformed from something tactical into something charged, the kind of silence that exists between two bodies that have stopped pretending.Three days after the blackout, Tobin was in the kitchen at one in the morning, standing at the counter with a cutting board and a knife and a collection of ingredients ga
Last Updated: 2026-05-30
Chapter: CHAPTER 9: THE DARKThe power went out at eleven forty-two on a Friday night, and the darkness that followed was so immediate and so total that Tobin was on his feet with his back against the wall before his conscious mind had finished processing the absence of light.He had studied the estate's electrical system during his first week, noting the backup generators and the battery-operated emergency lighting along the main corridors. Everything going dark simultaneously meant either catastrophic failure or deliberate sabotage, and in his experience, the former was almost always a cover for the latter. He moved to the door and stepped into a hallway lit only by the faint blue glow of a single emergency strip running on its own battery.Footsteps approached from the end of the corridor, measured and deliberate, and Tobin's body tensed before his mind identified the cadence. He had memorized the way every person in this estate walked within his first week, and these particular footsteps belonged to Emeric.E
Last Updated: 2026-05-30
Chapter: CHAPTER 8: THE TELLThe chess game that night started like all the others, with Emeric behind the white pieces and Tobin behind the black and the study lit by the amber glow of a single desk lamp that made the room feel smaller and warmer than it was. But something was different in the air between them, a tension that had been accumulating since the overheard conversation with Nikolai and that now sat in the space above the board like smoke that refused to dissipate.Emeric opened with the Queen's Gambit, which Tobin had learned was his preferred opening when he had something on his mind. The aggressive openings were for restless days. The Queen's Gambit was for days when he wanted to talk."You play differently when you are thinking about something," Emeric said, moving his bishop into a controlling diagonal. "Your pawns become defensive. You build walls instead of lines of attack.""Is that an observation or a criticism?""An observation. I do not criticize the way people reveal themselves. It would be
Last Updated: 2026-05-30
Chapter: CHAPTER 7: THE DEFENSENikolai came to Emeric's office on a Thursday evening, and Tobin heard every word because the ventilation system in the east corridor carried sound with the fidelity of a confessional.He had discovered the acoustic flaw on his second night at the estate, cataloguing it alongside the camera blind spots and the patrol gaps and all the other imperfections in a security system that was excellent but not perfect. The vent in the hallway outside the guest wing shared a duct with the one in Emeric's office, and when both grilles were open, voices travelled through the sheet metal with a clarity that was almost indecent.Tobin stood in the hallway with his back against the wall and his pulse measured and even, and he listened to the sound of Nikolai laying out his case like a prosecutor who had already decided the verdict."His name appears in a military intelligence database," Nikolai said, and his voice carried the rough satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for this moment. "Not the
Last Updated: 2026-05-30
Chapter: CHAPTER 6: THE ASSIGNMENTTobin spent the next two days watching Nikolai the way a soldier watches a perimeter he knows will be breached. The elder Saal brother moved through the estate with the restless energy of a man who believed the world owed him something it had not yet delivered, appearing at meals and meetings with a frequency that felt deliberate, as if he wanted Tobin to know he was being observed in return.The confrontation in the hallway had changed something fundamental about the geometry of the estate. Before, Tobin had operated with two concerns: advancing his mission and managing his proximity to Emeric. Now a third variable had entered the equation, one that was volatile and personal and carried the name of the man who had killed his mother.Tobin found himself cataloguing Nikolai's movements with the same precision he had once reserved for Emeric's security systems. Nikolai took his coffee black and drank it standing. He made phone calls from the terrace where the estate's surveillance did n
Last Updated: 2026-05-30
Chapter: CHAPTER 5: THE FRACTURETobin did not sleep that night. He lay on the bed with the ceiling pressing down on him and the contents of that file rearranging everything he had built over the past two years. Every piece of intelligence he had gathered, every hour of planning, every cold and careful step that had led him to this estate had been aimed at one man, and that man turned out to be the wrong one.Emeric Saal had not ordered the raid that killed his mother. He had not known about it until it was over, and when he found out, he had punished his brother and launched an investigation. The civilian casualty report was clinical and brief, the kind of language that reduces a human life to a line item, but it existed, which meant someone inside the syndicate had at least acknowledged that a woman had died who should not have died.The person who should be sitting at the other end of Tobin's fury was Nikolai. The brother with more ambition than patience, the one who left his bishop exposed and ran unsanctioned op
Last Updated: 2026-05-19
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