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CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

作者: Wren Gray
last update 公開日: 2026-06-03 16:42:07

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

"The most dangerous thing you can do at a table full of wolves is look happy."

ZYRAN

The Rossi dining room was exactly as I remembered it.

Long table, good china, candles that Mrs. Rossi lit for every dinner whether it was a casual Tuesday or a formal occasion because she believed, genuinely believed, that a well-lit table made people kinder to each other. The smell of something slow-cooked coming from the kitchen. The low hum of conversation already filling the room before
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    "Love isn't always said with words. Sometimes it's said with escape routes and emergency plans and a room you built around someone surviving."MYRAHe showed me on a Sunday morning.No preamble, no announcement. He just appeared in the doorway of the library where I'd been reading since breakfast and said "come with me" in the tone that meant it wasn't urgent but it was deliberate, and I set my book down and followed him.He took me through the kitchen and past the security center I already knew about and then further, through a door I'd always assumed was storage, down a staircase I hadn't known existed.The staircase was short — one flight, maybe fifteen steps — and opened into a corridor that was clean and well lit and completely at odds with the basement aesthetic I'd been expecting. No exposed pipes, no concrete dust, no abandoned boxes. Just a smooth wide corridor with doors on either side and lights that activated as we walked, motion sensitive, efficient."How long has this be

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    "The most unsettling thing isn't being followed. It's realizing someone wanted you to know."MYRAZoe noticed it first.That surprised me afterward, thinking about it. Zoe was the loudest of us, the most present in whatever immediate moment she was occupying, not typically the one who clocked peripheral details. But we were back in Arabella's car heading toward the restaurant we'd picked for dinner, all four of us slightly warm and loose from the spa, and Zoe was in the passenger seat and went quiet mid-sentence."Don't look," she said. "Actually — okay, look, but casually. Black SUV. Three cars back."Arabella's eyes moved to the rearview mirror with the controlled subtlety of someone who'd grown up around enough money to have had a security briefing at least once in her life.Chloe, beside me in the back seat, turned to look out her window at the city passing by and said nothing, which meant she was processing.I didn't look. I already knew."It's been there since the coffee shop,"

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

    "The most effective weapons are never the loudest ones."DAMONI had made one mistake.Just one. In forty years of operating in this world, of building something from nothing through patience and precision and a willingness to do what other men flinched from — one mistake.I had underestimated Zyran Theon.Not his power. I'd never underestimated that. I'd known from the beginning that a direct confrontation with the Kingsmen was a losing proposition, that my resources against theirs was an equation that didn't resolve in my favor. That had never been the plan. Direct confrontation was for men who hadn't learned that the most effective damage happened quietly, from angles nobody was watching.What I'd underestimated was his attachment.I'd assumed the marriage was strategic. That was reasonable — everything in our world was strategic, and Zyran Theon above all people was not a man who made decisions based on sentiment. I'd assumed the girl was a piece on a board, protected because her

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

    "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."MYRAIt was sitting on my pillow when I came to bed.Not wrapped elaborately, not presented with any kind of ceremony. Just there, on my side of the bed, a flat rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper with a small piece of twine around it. No bow. No card.I stood at the edge of the bed and looked at it for a moment.Zyran was in the bathroom, I could hear the shower running, and I had the particular feeling of someone who'd walked into a room and found something they hadn't been prepared for. Not alarming. Just — unexpected, in the specific way that made your heart do something before your brain had caught up enough to explain why.I sat down on the bed and picked it up.It was lighter than I expected. And slightly irregular in shape, not perfectly flat, which ruled out most obvious guesses. I turned it over in my hands once.Then I unwrapped it.The brown paper came away carefully, because I had always been a careful

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