All Chapters of FOUR SHADES OF DREY: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Chapter 71AureliaI didn't stop walking until I was back in my room, and even then, my legs kept moving. Pacing. Like my body hadn't got the message yet that there was nowhere left to run to.I sat on the edge of my bed and I cried. Not the quiet kind from the night before. This was ugly and loud, the kind that comes from somewhere lower than your chest, somewhere I didn't know I had left after everything else this week had already taken out of me. I cried until my throat was raw and my head throbbed and there was nothing left in me to cry with.Then I stopped, because something colder had taken its place.I looked around my room. The desk where I used to do my reading before any of this started. The window where I used to watch the quad and tell myself maybe this year wouldn't be complete torture. The bed where I'd once believed, stupidly, happily, that I'd finally found somewhere I belonged.I couldn't stay here.I shouldn't have come here in the first place, trying to prove I cou

Chapter 73DreytonShe was taller somehow, though I knew that wasn't possible, it must have just been the way she carried herself now. Head up. Shoulders back. Dark auburn hair loose down her back instead of scraped into a bun under a hood. She wore a dress that didn't hide a single inch of her, and she wore it like she'd never once in her life wanted to disappear.This wasn't the girl who used to fold herself into oversized jackets, who used to keep her eyes on the floor and her voice below a whisper. This woman walked through that door like the room belonged to her.But I knew her. God help me, I knew exactly who she was."Ton?" Dreyden's voice again, sharper now. "Ton, you've gone silent on us. What's going on?"I didn't answer. I couldn't. My eyes were locked on her face, waiting for her to notice she was in a room full of strangers, waiting for the moment to pass so I could breathe again.Then her eyes found mine.And she smiled.Not the shy, grateful smile I remembered from a l

Chapter 75AureliaShe turned and looked at me, her jaw tight. Then she said, "Okay. We'll do it. But first I need to call your parents.""No." The word shot out of me before I'd even finished hearing her sentence. I pushed myself up against the pillows, wincing at the pull in my stomach. "No, Sienna, please don't. Not them. Not yet.""Lia...""I mean it." My hands had started shaking, and I gripped the blanket to stop it. "You don't understand. If they know, they're going to look at me like I'm broken. Like I ruined everything. My mum's going to ask a hundred questions I can't answer and my dad's going to go quiet in that way he does, and I can't, Sienna, I can't do that on top of everything else."Sienna didn't argue straight away. She pulled her chair closer to the bed instead, close enough that our knees almost touched, and she waited until I looked at her properly before she spoke again."Listen to me," she said. "You're lying in a hospital bed right now with nobody who actuall

Chapter 77DreyvenNone of us slept.I know that for a fact because at six in the morning I walked into the kitchen of the estate and found Dreyden already there, sitting at the counter with a coffee gone cold in front of him, staring at nothing. Dreylen came down not long after, still in yesterday's clothes, which told me he hadn't bothered going to bed at all.Drayton was the last one in, and none of us needed to ask if he'd slept either. He looked like a man who'd been hit somewhere he couldn't block."So," Dreyden said, not looking up from his cold coffee. "She's back.""She's back," I repeated, and the words felt strange in my mouth, like a sentence I'd rehearsed so many times in my head over five years that saying it out loud now felt almost unreal."She knew we were listening," Dreylen said quietly. "Last night. She knew Drayton had us on the line the whole time and she still said everything she said." He shook his head slowly. "That's not an accident. She wanted us to hear it

Chapter 79DreyvenI waited until the shutters were down and Leo had gone home before I opened the folder properly.The garage was quiet in the way it only got after hours, engines cooling, the smell of oil settling into something almost peaceful. I sat on an upturned crate under the one working lamp and turned the pages slowly, the way you'd handle something you already suspected might bite.It read clean on the surface. Sponsorship terms. Brand ambassador language. A generous figure attached to my name and V-Spec's, generous enough that any sensible business owner would have signed it without blinking.Then I found the clause on page four.Cross Industries retains right of first refusal on any future equity offering, and further, a standing option to acquire up to twenty percent of V-Spec Holdings at a fixed valuation, exercisable at any point within the next three years.I read it twice to be sure I wasn't imagining it. I wasn't.It was buried well. Wrapped in enough legal padding