All Chapters of Contracted to the man who broke me : Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Adrian's POVI couldn't sleep.The thought of Ethan in a room with Leon sat somewhere behind my sternum, heavy and unmoving, like something lodged. I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know if I even had the right to do anything with it.'Is it valid,' I kept asking myself, 'to drive there? To go and bring him back?'And then the quieter, uglier question beneath that one.'What if he wants to be there?'He made a choice tonight. He left with Leon. That was a decision. Adults make decisions.I exhaled.Wait.....Maybe I'm reading into nothing. Two people who know each other, who had too much to drink. A shared room doesn't mean what my mind insists it means.'Is it?' my subconscious asks flatly.I don't answer.I'm sitting on the balcony facing the front gate, the cigar burning slow between my fingers. The smoke curls and threads into the cold air and disappears. The cold doesn't help. It passes over my skin and does nothing, sends a shiver down my spine and leaves the noise in m

Ethan's POVI reached the office before Adrian did.That was the only mercy the morning offered me. Two hours and fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, where his chair was empty and his office door was shut and I could sit at my desk and simply exist without performing anything. I set my bag down. Pulled up my emails. Stared at the screen without reading a single word on it.Leon had texted.I knew without opening it. The notification sat at the top of my phone screen, preview visible just long enough for me to catch the first four words before I turned the screen face down again. The same way I had at breakfast. The same reflex, the same dull panic underneath it.I did not read it.I opened my emails instead and started going through the morning queue. Responses to draft. A meeting to reschedule. A report Adrian had asked for by noon that I had half finished last night before everything went sideways. I pulled it up and started filling in the gaps, and for a while the work was enough. Just

Ethan's POV"Leon..."I murmured his name under my breath. He was standing at the gate of the restaurant.He was scanning the room with the focused look of someone who already knew what they were searching for. His eyes moved in a sweep and then landed, directly and without hesitation, on me.Neither of us moved.He looked tired.The careful put-together quality he usually carried was slightly undone. Jacket creased. Shadows under his eyes that had not been there the last time I had seen him clearly, before last night rearranged the coordinates of everything between us.Davel set his fork down quietly."Ethan," he said. Low. Even. A single word containing an entire instruction.I was already pulling my napkin from my lap.Leon started walking toward us.The restaurant was not large. The distance between the entrance and our corner took him ten seconds to cross and every one of those seconds had a specific weight to it. Around us other tables continued their conversations, someone laug

Adrian's POVNoah was waiting outside the lift at 5:00 pm when I came out of the cabin. He was leaning against the car with his jacket on and his hands in his pockets, looking at his phone with the relaxed posture of a man who had no particular anxiety about the evening ahead. Which was either genuine or performance, and with Noah it was sometimes genuinely difficult to tell."Castellano," he said when I reached him. Not a question."Castellano," I confirmed.We got in the car.The Meridian was forty minutes across the city in evening traffic. Noah used the time to go through the key points of Mark's report from memory, which he had clearly read at least twice. He had that quality. Information moved through him and stayed."Thirty percent of the order tonight," he said. "They put up fifty percent token. The remainder ships day after tomorrow pending the transport window.""Correct.""And we're pricing it at the revised figure. Not the original.""Yes."The losses from less than a mont

Adrian's POVThe way I sensed it before it happened. The calm before the storm has finally taken a blow. Awakening me from the relaxing slumber I was drifting too.The call came at 4:47 in the morning.I was already awake.I had not slept, not properly, but had my eyes closed. As I had been at my desk since two in the afternoon, going over the route maps Damian had sent through, tracing the transfer points with a finger that kept stopping at the same stretch of road. The eleven kilometer corridor between Porto Castellano's private freight dock and the airstrip. Flat terrain. Three blind curves. One overpass.It was the overpass that bothered me.I had looked at it for almost an hour before the phone rang. Something about it sat wrong in my gut, the way a bad feeling sits before you can name it. I told myself I was being careful. I told myself that was the job. Still, I had circled it twice in red ink before I even knew why.When my phone lit up with Damian's name, I already knew it wa