บททั้งหมดของ BLOOD FOR A BRIDE : บทที่ 101 - บทที่ 110

-ASARAIAH KAINE- The city looked different when people feared my name. For weeks after I returned, the Kaine crest turned into a warning. Trucks moved faster through checkpoints. Police cars slowed when they saw my convoys. Even the air around our buildings felt heavier, like the city was waiting for permission to breathe. Malrik gave me that look again this morning—the one that said he still couldn’t decide if he wanted to kiss me or lock me away. Too late. I already had the keys. “Which route leaks the most?” I asked Gaya, eyes on the digital map stretched across the desk. “Sector Twelve. The accountant handles it. Name’s Casari.” Casari. I remembered him. Pale hands, expensive watch, always too polite. The kind of man who thought a smile could hide rot. “Schedule a meeting,” I said. “No guards. No Malrik.” Gaya hesitated. “You want to face him alone?” “I’m not the one who should be afraid.” ⸻ The Kaine Tower boardroom still smelled like smoke from the last time Malrik

-ASARAIAH KAINE-The city tasted of ash and metal for three days.Every headline, every stray whisper, braided Montova and Kaine together like a wound and a cauterising stitch. The news called it a “crime war.” People on the street called it a warning. In the safe corners where both names meant something more than money, they called it blood.I woke with soot in the bed sheets and the sound of a dozen radios in my head. My left side still throbbed where the car had folded; the scar had the sharp, glittering itch that always preceded a memory. Eryss had taught me how to breathe through those things, how to fold pain into a small, usable edge. But that morning the edge felt hungry.Gaya had left instructions. Drayan and Kavin picked up the pieces. Men and women moved like a single organism through the network Malrik had built: cash runs rerouted, safehouses purged, old favors called in and paid in gold and threat.“Sit,” Leina said, placing a plate of food on the table like offering not

-ASARAIAH-I never planned on coming back to Milan.The city smelled like rain and old blood — too polished to remember its crimes.But every storm ends where it started, and mine started here.When Gaya dropped the folder on the table that morning, I already knew what was inside.A photograph. Grainy, recent. My father stepping out of a courthouse, gray-haired but still standing straight, surrounded by cheap muscle.He was supposed to be dead.“Where?” I asked.“Milan,” she said. “He’s rebuilding the Montova network. Drugs, weapons, offshore laundering. A few of our suppliers are already sniffing around him.”So he was clawing his way back, same as always. I’d buried ghosts before; this one needed to burn.“Book the jet,” I said.The Kaine jet waited under thunder-purple clouds. Malrik stood at the stairs, black-on-black, rain rolling off his coat.“You’re not going alone,” he said.“I wasn’t asking permission.”“You never do.”He followed me up the steps anyway.Inside, the c

-ASARAIAH KAINE-Rain in this city always smells like money that’s been cleaned in blood.Tonight, it smelled like war.We hit the south docks just past midnight. Six SUVs, tinted black, moving as one organism. Malrik had wanted to come; I told him no. He’d taught me to fight monsters. Now he could watch one work.Kavin sat shotgun, checking his tablet. “Last ping from the insider came from Warehouse 22.”“That’s Selene’s old territory,” I said.He nodded. “Her people rebranded as Glass. Imports, clubs, laundering. Same core, new skin.”“Cut the skin,” I said, “it still bleeds the same.”We rolled in silent.The compound looked abandoned—graffiti, broken lights, wind slicing through busted glass. But the hum under it wasn’t emptiness; it was waiting.“Two guards by the main door,” Kavin whispered.“I’ll take them.”He almost protested. Almost.I was already out.Boots quiet on wet concrete, gun drawn. The guards barely had time to exhale before the silencer kissed the back of t

-ASARAIAH KAINE-The night smelled like metal.The kind of night where bad things didn’t just happen—they waited, patient as predators, watching the world breathe just so they could steal the next inhale.We were halfway back to the mansion when the pain hit me.Not soft. Not warning.A blade-to-the-nerve, lightning-to-bone kind of pain that made my vision pulse white.“Malrik—” I managed before the world blurred sideways.He was on me before I hit the ground.His hands were everywhere—my ribs, my face, my chest—as if checking which part of me was breaking fastest.“Stay awake,” he ordered.His voice was steady.His eyes were not.Everything in him was unraveling.I tried to breathe but my lungs snagged like someone had stitched glass inside them. My hands shook uncontrollably. My skin burned from the inside out.“What’s happening to me?” I gasped.He didn’t answer immediately.And that terrified me more than the pain.When Malrik Kaine didn’t speak, something ancient and lethal was h