All Chapters of bound by deception: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX — "Recording"Isabella's POVThe mirror knew all my secrets.I had sat in front of this particular one for five years — watched myself become a wife in it, a Luna, a woman who had built an entire architecture of self around a man who was currently sleeping four doors down and hadn't touched me with genuine want in longer than I was prepared to calculate.I sat now in only a towel.Hair wet. Skin still warm from the shower. The woman looking back at me from the glass composed and certain and running through the evening's inventory with the specific efficiency of a general reviewing a battlefield at dawn.Derek had called.The alliance was in motion.The recording was ready.And Daemon was somewhere in this house moving through his evening routine with that closed, unreachable quality he'd been wearing since the party — since the hallway, since Ira walked back into that ballroom with her throat marked and her chin up and that gold dress doing things to the air around

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT — "Aura For Aura"Irabella's POVDerek was still talking.I knew that because his mouth was moving and sound was coming out of it and the sounds were arranged in the shape of words — warm words, easy words, the specific register of a man who was very good at filling space with himself in ways that felt like company.I heard none of it.My fork moved across my plate. Came back. Moved again. The mechanical performance of a woman eating lunch who had completely lost the thread of what eating was for.His hand found mine on the table.Light. Easy. A touch that asked nothing and expected everything to be fine.My skin crawled.I looked at our hands. His fingers over mine, warm and well-meaning, and felt the specific wrongness of it move through me like a frequency I couldn't tune out. Not disgust — nothing as clean as that. Just the bone-deep knowledge that this was the wrong hand. The wrong warmth. The wrong weight against my skin.I picked up my glass with my other h

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO — "CONSUMMATE"Irabella's POVI turned. Forced the smile up from some buried, ruined place I didn't know I still had access to."Yeah. That would be great." My voice came out smooth, disgustingly smooth, smooth enough to fool a room. "And as Daemon's secretary — and your sister — let me know if you need anything for it."I made it to my room before my legs understood what they'd just agreed to.The door locked behind me with a click too loud for the silence it dropped into, and then my breath simply stopped arriving. Caught somewhere high in my chest, shallow, useless. My hands shook — not trembling, shaking, violent and constant, like something underneath my skin was trying to get out. A thousand needles. That was the only language my body had left. A thousand needles, all of them aimed in.Don't give up.My wolf's voice, low and frantic, pacing the inside of my ribs. He's ours. You promised to get him back.He doesn't love us. The thought arrived with its own teet

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR — "SWITCH"Irabella's POVThe glass was an inch from my mouth when Derek's phone buzzed against his hip.He glanced down. Something crossed his jaw — that same tightening from before, quick, controlled, gone before I could name it — and then the easy smile was back, slotted perfectly into place."Sorry. Have to take this." A light squeeze of my arm. "Two minutes."He stepped back and folded into the crowd.I stood there. Lowered the glass. Looked at it again — at the faint wrongness still sitting in the air just above the rim, patient, unmoving, not asking to be explained. I set it down on the nearest tray without drinking from it. Didn't think too hard about why.Across the room, Isabella stood near the far wall.Deep in conversation with someone half-swallowed by a pillar — a man, broad-shouldered, face angled just wrong enough that I couldn't place him. She tilted her head toward him, said something low, and then lifted a glass to her mouth. The same kind of gla

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX — "BRAVO"Isabella's POVDerek was useless.Circling the room in tight, graceless loops — hands raking through his hair, one knee bent like the window was still an option, his mouth forming the first half of sentences that died before they reached sound. His shirt untucked. His jaw working on nothing. He looked like a man who had rehearsed for every outcome except the one he was standing in.I had stopped looking at him.I was past panic. Past it the way you get past a locked door once you've decided the wall beside it is thinner — you stop testing the handle and you find something heavier.Think, Isa.My pulse was loud. I let it be loud. Behind it, underneath it, my mind had already gone cold and begun to move — laying every option flat on an invisible table, assessing each one in the space of a breath. The door. The hallway. The voices already gathering on the other side of it, the sound of more than one person, the specific weight of people who had already decide