Lahat ng Kabanata ng SAVED BY MY BROTHERS : Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

After Bella died, Mark started to live with Henry.It was not a gentle upbringing.Henry’s new apartment was the same shabby, defeated place it had always been — the same bottles, the same smell, the same television flickering at nobody. The difference now was that there was a boy in it, growing up inside all of that, absorbing it the way children absorb everything around them whether anyone intends them to or not.Henry was a thief. He had always been a thief — small jobs, opportunistic crimes, the particular moral flexibility of a man who had decided long ago that the world owed him something and had been collecting informally ever since. He drank too much and worked too little and loved his son in the only way he knew how, which was imperfectly and with conditions attached.But there was one thing Henry planted in Mark with complete consistency, watered every day, tended with more care than he gave anything else in his life.Hatred.Zara Ashford, he told him. The woman who called

Outside in the garden, Marcus reached for another piece of meat off the grill and said, almost as an afterthought: “Oh — and apparently the footage they found shows someone in a mask and specific gloves. That’s all they have.” Mrs. Ashford waved her hand. “Marcus, please. Don’t ruin a perfectly good meal with that. Let them find whoever they need to find. That’s their job.” Marcus shrugged and let it go. The barbecue continued. In the bedroom, Zara looked at the two men standing in the middle of her floor and let the silence sit for a moment before she spoke. “Your mother,” she said to Mark, “thought she was being clever. Paying someone to poison my food.” She tilted her head slightly. “But the girl she chose told me everything. Every word of it.” She paused. “So I returned the favour. A simple gas leak. I made sure you and your father were out of the house first — made sure you were safe. Your mother was alone because that was her own choice that evening.” She looked at Mark

She was late.Not catastrophically late — just enough to push open the music room door to find everyone already seated and playing, their instruments filling the room with the particular organised chaos of a warm-up session already in progress. Several heads turned. Lilly smiled apologetically at no one in particular, made her way to her seat, pulled out her saxophone, and joined in as smoothly as she could manage.The teacher did not look impressed.When the session ended and students began filing out, his voice cut through the noise.“Lilly. Stay behind please.”She stayed, saxophone across her lap, wearing the expression of someone who already knows what kind of conversation this is going to be.“If it’s about being late, sir—” she began.“It’s partly about being late.”“I have a solution for that, actually. I found a shortcut across campus today. It won’t happen again — or if it does, significantly less often. I promise.”He looked at her with the patient expression of a man who h

Saturday?” Lilly asked.“Practice,” Zane said, settling himself on the counter with the easy comfort of someone who considers every surface a valid seat.“Today?”“Evening practice.”“Thursday?”“Practice.”“Friday?”“Music classes.” He looked at her. “See — we’re both busy. This is going to be harder to arrange than I thought.”Lilly came around the counter and stood in front of him. “So when exactly—”“Sunday,” he said. “My place.”She looked at him. “Your place? What if your girlfriend walks in?”“Girlfriend.” He said the word the way one might say a word in a foreign language they don’t speak. “That is genuinely not in my vocabulary. I don’t do that.” He paused. “And yes, it has to be my place — because the person we need to convince lives nearby and she needs to see it with her own eyes.”“Who?”“My best friend’s younger sister. Jade.” He said the name with the particular weight of someone explaining a complicated force of nature. “She runs information on this campus better than

“Why is your arm on me like that?”Lilly turned to look at Zane with the specific expression she reserved for things that required immediate correction.Zane didn’t move his arm. “Relax. We need to make this convincing.” He glanced toward the front of the classroom. “Besides — he’s not even looking at us right now.”Ethan was sitting a few seats ahead, turned slightly away, apparently absorbed in something on his desk.Zane picked up the water bottle beside him and threw it toward the front of the room.The entire class turned.Ethan turned with them — and his eyes landed on Zane and Lilly, close together, Zane’s arm draped casually across the back of her chair. Something shifted in his expression. Not nothing. Definitely not nothing.“See?” Zane said quietly, eyes forward. “Told you.”Lilly kept her face neutral and felt quietly triumphant. “You’re going to make this work, aren’t you.”“Obviously.”Across the room, Hannah and Dave exchanged a look — the look of two people who have be