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CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE

Author: Wren Gray
last update publish date: 2026-06-21 23:17:30

"The people who love you the most are sometimes the ones you have to fight the hardest to be seen by."

MYRA

I wasn't supposed to hear it.

That was the thing I kept telling myself afterward, like it somehow changed what I'd heard. I'd gone looking for Zyran because he'd been gone from the main room for longer than made sense and I'd felt his absence the way I'd started feeling his absence — immediately and with a specific kind of awareness that I was still getting used to.

I'd followed the route
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  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY TWO

    "The most romantic thing isn't grand gestures. It's being remembered in the small, ordinary details."MYRAHe knocked on my door at seven in the evening on a Wednesday.That was already unusual. Zyran didn't knock on my door at seven on Wednesdays. Wednesdays were call nights — he had standing meetings with various people that ran from five until sometimes ten, the kind of back to back scheduling that meant I usually saw him briefly at dinner and then not again until late. I'd learned the shape of his week the way you learned the layout of a house you lived in, knowing which rooms would be occupied at which hours without having to check.So when the knock came I was already slightly confused before I even opened the door.He was standing in the hallway in dark jeans and a black jacket instead of the work clothes he'd been in all day. No tie. His hair was slightly less formal than usual. He looked — almost casual, which on Zyran was a significant departure from the baseline."Get dress

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY ONE

    "The hardest thing about being wrong is watching the evidence pile up before you're ready to admit it."LUCAI'd been avoiding the Theon estate.That was deliberate. Three weeks of deliberate, conscious avoidance that I'd justified to myself in a dozen different ways — too busy, too much happening with the Serpents situation, too many things requiring my attention that weren't my sister and my best friend and the mess I'd made by putting them in the same house together.The real reason was simpler and less flattering.I wasn't ready to see them together and know what I knew now.Zyran had broken the one promise that had mattered. I'd built the entire arrangement around my certainty that he was incapable of wanting Myra the way he apparently wanted her, and I'd been wrong in a way that made every decision I'd made since look different in hindsight. I'd handed him the one person I'd spend my life protecting and told myself it was safe because he wouldn't feel anything.The man felt some

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY

    "Sometimes the bravest thing is not fighting the dark. Sometimes it's just walking toward the light in someone else's room."MYRAThe nightmare was the same one.It was always the same one, or close enough to the same one that the differences didn't matter. The details shifted sometimes — the room changed, the lighting changed, the specific words were different — but the feeling was identical every time. That particular helpless quality, the sensation of being very small in a space that had decided to close around you, and no matter which direction you moved the walls were already there.I woke up at two forty seven in the morning with my heart going too fast and my hands clenched so hard that the palms ached.I lay there for a moment doing the thing I always did after nightmares — orienting myself. Ceiling. Window. The weight of the covers. The familiar smell of the room. Real things, present things, the inventory of right now rather than whatever my sleeping brain had been building.

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

    "The most dangerous place a person can live is inside someone else's mind. Because no one can follow them there to get them out."ZYRANHe was home.I'd known he would be. Nikolai's surveillance had established his patterns with the kind of precision that came from ten days of careful, patient observation, and Tuesday evenings Jeremy Torrence spent at his apartment. Alone. Consistent as clockwork, which was the particular irony of men who believed themselves untouchable — they stopped varying their routines because they'd stopped believing their routines needed protecting.The building was exactly as described. Midtown, mid-range, the kind of place that suggested comfortable rather than wealthy. A single camera at the entrance that I walked past without concern because I'd had Marcus loop the feed twenty minutes ago. A doorman who was currently on a break that would last exactly as long as I needed it to.I took the stairs.Fourth floor. Apartment 4C. I stood outside the door for a mo

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT

    "There is a particular kind of man who looks at something gentle and sees something to destroy. And there is a particular kind of consequence for that."ZYRANI stood in the kitchen for four minutes after she left.I know it was four minutes because I watched the clock on the wall without meaning to, my eyes fixing on it the way eyes fixed on things when the brain needed something simple and external to anchor itself to while it processed something it wasn't ready to process.Four minutes.Then I picked up my phone and called Nikolai."I need everything you have on Jeremy Torrence and self-harm," I said. "Specifically whether he knew. Whether he was aware of it during the relationship."A pause. "That's in the supplemental file. Section four. I flagged it but you hadn't asked about it specifically so I didn't push.""Send it now.""Already sending."I hung up and waited.The file arrived in three minutes. I opened it standing at the kitchen counter in the quiet house and read it the w

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN

    "The scars we hide the hardest are never the ones on our skin. They're the ones we made trying to survive the ones inside."MYRAI answered his question.Not the full answer. Not everything. But the truthful one, the one that lived in the part of me that had stopped being able to lie to him about the things that actually mattered."No," I said. "He never hit me."Zyran's shoulders dropped a fraction. Almost invisible. The specific release of someone who'd been bracing for one answer and received a different one."Not physically," I added quietly. "He was too careful for that. He understood that marks were evidence and he never wanted evidence."Zyran looked at me."What he did leave," I said, "was harder to see. That was the whole point."We were still in the kitchen, morning light coming through the windows, coffee going warm in my mug. It felt strange to be talking about this in such an ordinary setting. Like the conversation deserved a more significant location than a kitchen on a

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