All Chapters of bound by deception: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

60 Chapters

DISAPPOINTED"

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN — "DISAPPOINTED"Irabella's POVThe floor was cold against my cheek when I came to.I didn't move immediately. Let the room find me first — ceiling, walls, the gold-edged furniture that was wrong in the specific way of waking somewhere you didn't choose. My skull was doing something punishing behind both eyes. My mouth tasted like cotton and something chemical underneath it.What am I doing here.I pushed myself upright. Sat with both palms flat on the floor and let the room stop tilting. The party. The wine. I remembered the glass in my hand, the noise of the room around me, the particular warmth of too many bodies in a dressed-up space.After that — nothing.Not darkness. Not sleep. A gap. Clean-edged, total, the kind of absence that had been done to me rather than fallen over me naturally.I found a mirror. Looked at it without wanting to.Hair flattened on the left side. Mascara sitting in the hollows under my eyes. The wine-red dress I'd worn to the party had

mis match

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT — "MISMATCH"Daemon's POVThe club was the kind of place that didn't advertise.No sign above the door. No velvet rope visible from the street. You knew about it because someone who mattered had told you, and if no one who mattered had told you, then it didn't exist. Low ceilings, dark wood, leather worn soft from decades of men who came here specifically to be left alone. Candlelight that moved but never quite reached the corners. The kind of silence that had been purchased and maintained like any other luxury — quietly, expensively, without drawing attention to the effort.A girl moved on the low stage at the back of the room.Not performing for anyone in particular. Just moving the way expensive things move when they know they're being watched — slow, unhurried, with the confidence of something that has never had to ask for attention. The man beside her had one hand at her waist, loose, proprietary, not quite holding on. Lucien's hand. His eyes were somewhere e

kitten

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE — "KITTEN"Irabella's POVSleep had taken me deep.The dreamless kind — total, heavy, the kind that comes after a day that has asked too much of a body and a mind both. I didn't hear the hallway. Didn't register the creak of weight on old wood, the particular sound of footsteps that moved with intention rather than drifting. My body clocked it somewhere below thought and decided it wasn't worth surfacing for.Then the door opened.A change in the air. The specific disturbance of a sealed room letting something in.My eyes hadn't opened yet when the hand closed over my mouth.The sound I tried to make died somewhere behind his palm. My whole body seized — every nerve firing at once, the animal lurch of something ambushed in the dark — and then his weight settled over me, pinning me flat to the mattress with the total, unhurried certainty of someone who had already decided how this was going to go.I froze.His hand didn't move.My eyes opened.Found his.Gold. Even

found

CHAPTER FORTY — "FOUND"Irabella's POVI woke up tangled in him.His arm still locked across my waist. His chest solid and warm against my back. The room still mostly dark, that specific grey-blue quality of early morning that hadn't decided yet whether to become day. Neither of us had moved in the night. His body curved around mine like it had always known the shape of it, like sleep had stripped away every complication and left something simpler underneath.Something that felt like the most honest thing in this house.I kept my eyes closed.Let myself have the moment before the moment ended.His breathing changed first. A subtle shift — the rhythm of sleep giving way to wakefulness, the quality of his stillness becoming something more deliberate, more present. His attention sharpened before his body moved at all, and I felt it the way you felt weather changing, something in the air announcing itself before anything visible happened.He was watching me.I could feel it. The specific

doubt

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE — "DOUBT"Irabella's POV"Scent-hiding potion."He said it quietly. The specific quiet that had no heat in it — no anger, nothing as readable as anger. Just low and measured and absolutely still, the voice of a man who had already organized his thoughts and was now simply waiting to see what I did with mine."Why do you have more than one bottle."My brain stopped.Not slowed. Stopped. Every rehearsed answer, every exit route, every version of a lie I might have constructed in advance — gone. Cleared out by the single fact of him standing there with that bottle in his hand and those eyes on my face, reading it the way he read everything, with the unhurried certainty of someone who was very rarely wrong.His gaze didn't move.Full weight. The kind that didn't blink, didn't shift, didn't give an inch — it pinned me to the spot as effectively as a hand would have, and my body registered it the same way. My pulse had gone somewhere frantic. My hands, at my sides, had cur

verification

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO — "VERIFICATION"Daemon's POVThe pack doctor's office smelled like antiseptic and old paper.Daemon had been here twice in twenty years. Once when he was nineteen and had taken a silver blade to the shoulder in a border dispute that he'd won and not told his father about. Once the night his first Beta died, when the grief had expressed itself physically in the way pack bonds sometimes did — as something that had to be verified and not just felt.He hadn't been here since.He set the bottle on the desk without sitting down. Without preamble. Just placed it in the center of the desk lamp's light and stepped back and watched Dr. Whitmore's face.The doctor looked at it.At him.Back at the bottle — his hand reaching for it slowly, the careful, unhurried movement of a man approaching something he already recognized and was taking his time confirming. He turned it once under the light. The liquid inside caught the glow and held it.His expression changed.Not dramaticall

mum

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE — "MUM"Isabella's POVThe phone rang twice.I had the tears ready before anyone answered.Not produced — constructed. Built from the inside out, the specific architecture of grief that I had refined over twenty-six years into something I could deploy in under three seconds. The breath catching at the right interval. The slight thickening of the throat. The quality of sound that made people on the other end of a phone reach for something to hold onto before they'd processed a single word.The line opened."Mum." My voice cracked on cue — not too much, never too much, just enough to land in the chest of whoever was listening and stay there. "Dad. I'm going to die. My life is ruined. It's over, Mum."A sharp intake of breath. My mother's voice, immediately stripped of everything except alarm."Isabella. What happened — what's wrong—""Ira." I let the name arrive alone. Let it sit on the line like an accusation before I added anything to it. Then the sob — full, break

TRUMP CARD"

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR — "TRUMP CARD"Isabella's POVThe smirk came before the phone was fully down.I felt it arrive — slow, satisfied, the kind that didn't perform for anyone because there was no one in the room to perform for. Just me, and the phone, and the specific warmth of a plan clicking into its final position."Daemon, baby."I said it to the empty room. To the ceiling. To the photo still faintly glowing on my screen — his face, composed and certain, the face he wore in every room and had worn beside mine on the day I had made him mine."You're mine." My voice came out low and absolute. "Only mine." I looked at the photo for one more second. "I won't let anyone take you from me. Not even fate itself."I hummed.A small sound. Private. The specific contentment of a woman who had spent twenty-six years learning that the only thing standing between her and what she wanted was the willingness to reach for it.I started counting.Five.My thumb moved to the recording app. Opened it.

the test

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE — "THE TEST"Irabella's POVDaemon's face gave nothing away.That was the first thing I noticed — standing two steps behind him in the hospital corridor, watching him push Isabella's door open without knocking, without softening his posture, without any of the small adjustments people made when they were entering a room they were uncertain of. He walked in the way he walked into every room he'd already decided to own.His jaw was set. His eyes were flat. Whatever was moving behind them had been put somewhere unreachable before he'd crossed the threshold.Isabella was already watching the door.She'd been watching it — I understood that immediately, from the angle of her head, from the way she was positioned against the pillows with the IV line visible and her hands folded just so. She sat up the moment he entered, and the sitting-up was its own performance — slow, careful, the specific stiffness of a woman whose body was still recovering. Her shoulders curved in. He

NEVER YOUR DAUGHTER"

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX — "NEVER YOUR DAUGHTER"Irabella's POVDaemon walked out first.The door closed behind him and the room changed immediately — the air shifting, the last buffer between me and my parents gone, the specific quality of a space that had just lost the only person in it with the power to make anyone behave.My mother's hand closed around my arm before the click of the latch had finished.Hard. Immediate. The grip that didn't ask, that had never once in twenty-six years asked — that simply took, because taking had always been the language she used with me and she saw no reason to learn another."Did you tell him."Not a question. An accusation wearing the shape of one, her voice low and furious, the fury of a woman who had already decided on the verdict and was simply going through the procedural motion of asking."You ungrateful child." Her grip tightened. I felt the bones of my arm compress and said nothing. "How could you do this to your sister. After everything we've —

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