All Chapters of RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

AriaI stared at that message for a solid four minutes.Then I typed back: Who is this?Three dots appeared immediately. Like he’d been waiting.You know who this is.I put the phone face down on the nightstand and pressed both hands over my face and just laid there in the dark doing absolutely nothing useful. My heart was going insane. My brain was going insane. Every functioning part of me was screaming that this was wrong, that I needed to delete the message and go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and pretend it never happened.I picked the phone back up.How did you get my number?Your mother’s contacts. Goodnight, Aria.And then nothing. Just silence and the glow of my screen and me, lying in a mansion in Minnesota at midnight, officially losing my mind over a man I had no business thinking about.I didn’t sleep until three.Morning came too fast and too bright and I laid in bed for a full ten minutes arguing with myself about breakfast.I could stay upstairs. Claim a headache. Se

AriaThe lock clicked.Loudest sound I’d ever heard in my life.I stepped back from the door, heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat, and waited. One second. Two. The towel was wrapped tight around my chest and my hair was dripping onto my shoulders and every single nerve ending I had was standing at full attention.The door opened.Caden filled the doorway the way he filled every space he walked into completely, like the room had no choice but to reorganize itself around him. He’d taken his jacket off at some point, shirt still on but open at the collar, sleeves pushed up. His eyes found me immediately and stayed.The look on his face.Oh God, the look on his face.Not the controlled, unreadable mask from dinner. Not the cold boardroom stillness. This was something stripped back and raw and barely leashed, dark eyes moving over me in a way that made the air leave my lungs completely.Nobody had ever looked at me like that.Like I was something he’d been starving for.“I

AriaThe dress was a problem.I knew it was a problem when I bought it eight months ago for a New Year’s party in Boston that I ended up not attending. I knew it was a problem when I pulled it out of my wardrobe last night and held it up in the mirror. I knew it was a problem when I put it on twenty minutes ago and it sat on my body like a red flag specifically designed to end a man’s self control.I sent the picture anyway.Omg, I sent the picture anyway.I was in the car now, thigh pressed against the cold door, watching Minnesota glide past the window in the dark while my mother talked about the Henderson’s new lake house and Caden drove in complete silence from the front seat. He hadn’t said a word since I came downstairs. Hadn’t looked at me either, which should have felt like a rejection but somehow felt like the opposite — like looking directly at me was something he couldn’t trust himself to do in front of my mother.His jaw was tight enough to cut glass.I crossed my legs an

Forty Seven LikesAriaI stared at that photo for so long my eyes started to blur.Forty seven likes. Forty seven people had seen it already and the night wasn’t even over. Grace Henderson — whoever that was, Patricia’s daughter apparently, nineteen and bored and armed with a phone — had been standing at exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time and now there was photographic evidence of my stepfather pulling me into a private room at a public event and it was sitting on the internet collecting likes like it was nothing.Like it was nothing.Omg.I deleted the tag on my end with shaking fingers. Then I stood in that empty room for a solid two minutes just breathing, just staring at the covered tables and the stacked chairs and the single lamp in the corner and thinking about how spectacularly, catastrophically I had miscalculated this entire evening.The red dress. The photo I sent him. Room 14.Every single decision tonight had been made by someone with no survival instincts

Inside The WallsCadenI found the leak by three in the morning.It took me two hours, a phone call to my head of security, and pulling access logs from the household network that I should have checked weeks ago when Aria moved in and everything in my life started developing cracks.The voice note had been recorded on a device connected to our home wifi. Someone inside the house — or someone who had been inside the house recently enough to plant something — had recorded my wife’s private phone call and sent it to my stepdaughter at midnight as a warning.Not a threat yet.A demonstration.Look what I have. Look how close I am. Look how easily I could destroy everything.I sat at my desk with the security logs and a glass of scotch I wasn’t drinking and thought about every person who had been in this house in the last three weeks. Cleaners. The electrician for the east corridor. Mrs. Dalton’s nephew who had helped move furniture when Aria’s room was being prepared. Patricia Henderson