Lahat ng Kabanata ng When Forbidden Feels This Good: Kabanata 111 - Kabanata 118

Scarlett’s POVThe flowers were wildflowers.That was the first thing I noticed, standing in the sitting room with my coffee going cold in my hands and my heart doing something irregular in my chest. Not the arranged, predictable kind that came from a florist with their stems cut to identical lengths and their colours selected for maximum inoffensiveness. These were the kind that grew in fields without permission, in colours that did not coordinate so much as argue beautifully with each other, amber and deep violet and a particular warm gold that caught the afternoon light coming through the sitting room windows and held it.Someone had thought about those flowers.Someone had known that generic roses would not land correctly, that the person receiving them would notice the difference between chosen and purchased, between an arrangement that communicated I considered you and one that communicated I completed a task.I noticed the difference.I was furious at myself for noticing."Scar

Scarlett’s POV I Dragged Cade to his room violently. I closed the door.The sound of it was louder than I intended, the specific acoustic of a door shut with feeling rather than force, the wood finding the frame with a definitiveness that said everything the action was supposed to say.The room was quiet.I looked at him.He looked at me."What game," I said, and kept my voice at a very specific register, the register of someone who has a great deal of feeling available and is choosing, with enormous effort, to direct it toward language rather than its more instinctive destinations, "are you playing?"He said nothing.His hands stayed at his sides. His face stayed in that expression. His eyes, which usually did so much work in the absence of words, were doing something different from their usual communication, something turned inward rather than outward, something that was processing rather than projecting.He said nothing."Cade." I took a step toward him. "I am asking you a direct

Cade's POVThe door had barely stopped vibrating from the force of her breath against mine when the knock came.Sharp. Sudden. Real.Scarlett jerked back like she had been burned, her fingers slipping from my shirt as if touching me had become dangerous in a split second. I felt it too. That shift. That snap from heat to something tense and fragile.“Hey son, can I talk to you for a sec?”My father’s voice cut clean through the moment.Scarlett’s eyes widened. For a second, she looked like she might bolt straight through the wall instead of the door. She moved fast, crossing the room in hurried steps, stopping by the window like she had always been there. Like nothing had almost happened.Like I had not almost ruined everything.“Come in,” I said, forcing my voice to stay level.The door opened, and my father stepped in, his presence filling the room before he even spoke again. His eyes went to me first, then shifted, catching the figure by the window.He paused.Not long. Just enough

Scarlett’s POV My room had become a holding cell.Not literally, not in the way the underground parking level had been a holding cell, not with guns and concrete and the specific cold of genuine captivity. But in the functional sense of a space I was occupying because leaving it required a performance I had not yet assembled the materials for, because the corridor beyond the door contained a sitting room that contained a man who was pretending to be my boyfriend at the instruction of the man I actually loved, and navigating that corridor required a version of myself I was still in the process of constructing.I paced.The room was large enough that pacing was possible without immediately hitting a wall, which was something, the Blackwood estate having been built with the generous spatial logic of people who understood that rooms should be larger than the furniture in them. I made use of the space, moving from the window to the wardrobe and back, from the wardrobe to the door and back