All Chapters of He Destroyed My Life Yet I Craved Him : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Off the ClockBrielleFor a few seconds after my alarm went off, everything felt normal.The shrill sound pulled me out of sleep, and I reached for my phone automatically, silencing it. Sitting up, I rubbed ny eyes.Work.The thought came first.Then reality followed.I wasn’t going to work.The memory of Marcello’s office returned immediately.I dropped back against the headboard and stared at the ceiling.Sunlight shining through the curtains, painting pale gold stripes across the room.Usually, by now, I’d already be planning to take the bus or a cab. Instead, I had nowhere to be.The realisation irritated me far more than it should have.I checked my phone.Nothing.No missed calls.No emails.No messages from the company.I set it down.Then picked it up again less than two minutes later.Still nothing.“Ridiculous,” I muttered to myself.The company had suspended me yesterday evening and somehow expected me to sit around patiently while they figured out whether their own securit

The Replacement pt 2BrielleI woke to the soft chime of the seatbelt sign, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was. The cabin lights were dimmed, and most of the passengers around me were still asleep under blankets with their heads tilted against windows and headrests.Then everything came back. Christopher. The replacement. Thomas’s phone call.I shifted in my seat and looked out the small window beside me. Clouds stretched endlessly outside.I rubbed a hand across my face and checked the time on my phone. A few hours left. Not enough to sleep again, not that I would have managed it anyway.The last twenty-four hours had replayed in my head so many times that exhaustion had blurred into frustration.Because today wasn’t tomorrow anymore. Today was his first day. While I was crossing an ocean, Christopher was already taking over.’That realisation settled heavily in my chest.I had spent months building access, learning routines, memorising schedules, figuring out who mattered an

Last ContactBrielleThe room didn’t change after Thomas said it, but I did. At least something inside me did, because “Christopher is dead” didn’t feel like information.It felt like something that hadn’t fully landed yet, like my brain was still waiting for another version of the sentence that would make it less impossible.But there wasn’t one. Just silence on his end and noise on mine.Alessia’s voice came in the background asking Camilla something about a cartoon, mixed with the faint sound of movement in the living room.I stood still, gripping the phone tighter. My mouth opened, but nothing came out at first because it didn’t feel real enough to respond to.Then I forced it.“…say that again.”My voice sounded flat and detached, like it didn’t belong to me.Thomas didn’t hesitate this time.“Christopher is dead.”There was no softness in how he said it. No pausing just finality.I closed my eyes for a second, not because I was emotional, but because my body needed something to

The GapBrielleThe email sat open on my laptop long after the call ended.I had already looked at the image more times than I could count, but my eyes kept returning to it anyway. It showed Christopher walking out of the building alive, caught in a single frozen frame. The timestamp in the corner read 18:42, clear enough to make the whole thing feel real in a way Thomas’s phone call never had.I zoomed in again.The image blurred briefly before sharpening. Christopher looked relaxed apart from the limping. He wasn’t rushing anywhere, and there was nothing nervous or distracted about the way he carried himself.One hand rested in his coat pocket while his head tilted slightly downward, as though he were reading something on his phone or thinking about where he needed to be next.Nothing about him looked like a man walking toward his death.I leaned back in my chair and rubbed at my eyes.The apartment was quiet. Alessia had disappeared into her room hours ago, and Camilla had gone out

Back in ItalyBrielleThe flight landed just after sunrise.By the time I stepped out of the airport, the sky had become that pale grey-blue shade that always seemed to come before a proper morning. The air felt different from New York’s, cleaner, cooler, carrying a familiarity I hadn’t expected to notice so quickly.I stood beside the curb for a moment with one hand wrapped around the handle of my suitcase, watching taxis pull in and out of the pickup lane while travellers hurried past me in every direction.The suspension from Marcello's company was still hanging over my head. Christopher was still dead. None of that had changed. And yet, despite everything, I had boarded a plane and come back anyway.Because sitting in New York waiting for phone calls and updates clearly wasn’t getting me anywhere.A taxi pulled up in front of me.The driver leaned across the passenger seat and lowered the window.“Taxi?”I nodded and loaded my suitcase into the back.The apartment looked exactly h