All Chapters of RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

MargueriteAriaI grabbed the phone before Caden could stop me.The photograph sat on the screen — Marguerite in a parking lot, that hand on her shoulder, the casual menace of it making my stomach turn completely over. She was looking at the camera with an expression that was trying very hard to be composed and failing in the corners of her eyes.She was terrified.“Where is she,” I said out loud. To nobody. To the room. To the universe that had apparently decided three weeks of chaos wasn’t sufficient and had more to deliver.“Working on it.” Caden was already on his phone, not calling, typing fast, sending something to his security team. His jaw was set in that particular way that meant dangerous things were being decided behind a very still face.Sophia was standing at the window looking out at the street with her arms crossed, scanning the cars parked below with an attention that told me she’d spent time doing exactly this — watching exits, reading environments, being the kind of

Broken OpenAriaI didn’t cry prettily.I want to be clear about that because I’ve read enough books to know that women in stories cry in ways that are somehow still attractive — single tears, trembling lips, quiet dignity. That is not what happened to me on Caden’s couch at eight thirty in the morning.What happened was ugly and loud and completely without warning, the kind of crying that starts somewhere in your chest before your brain has finished processing what triggered it and arrives on your face as a full collapse before you can decide whether to let it.My mother.My mother had told someone my father was planning to go to the authorities.She hadn’t known. That was what Caden said. She was twenty-six and she trusted someone and she had no idea what Romano would do with that information, and I believed him, I believed every word of it, and it didn’t stop the crying at all because understanding something and feeling it are two entirely different things and right now my body wa

DavidAriaHis voice was rougher than I remembered.Slower. The recording had the ambient quality of a hospital room — that specific hum of machinery and distant corridor sounds, the particular acoustic of a space designed for emergency and not for comfort. But underneath all of that, underneath the roughness and the pauses where breathing was clearly difficult, it was him.David Cole. My father. Thirty-four years old and dying in a room he didn’t know would be the last one.I pressed both hands flat on the table and listened.He spoke for a long time.Not to me — he didn’t know about me yet, or maybe he did in the way that parents know things they haven’t been told, but this recording wasn’t addressed to anyone specific. It was addressed to the truth. He was a man who understood he might not make it out of that room and he was saying the things he needed said before the window closed.Romano’s name. The development project. The arrangement he’d discovered and refused. The threat he’

VoicemailAriaWe called four more times.Four calls, four voicemails, four times listening to Catherine Reeves’ calm professional greeting and leaving messages that got progressively less calm as the morning wore on. By the fourth one Caden had taken the phone from my hand because my voice was doing the thing where it stayed controlled on the surface and gave everything away underneath and he was better at leaving messages that didn’t sound like barely contained panic.His was controlled. Measured. Left his lawyer’s number and his direct line and said call immediately, it’s urgent, without explaining why in a way that could be intercepted and used.We sat with the silence after.“She could just be unavailable,” Leah said from the corner of the kitchen where she’d been quietly eating croissants and pretending not to listen while absolutely listening to everything. “She left the restaurant. She said she was going to go be a retired nurse. Maybe she turned her phone off.”“Maybe,” I sai

AfterAriaThe kitchen went completely silent.Not the tense silence of the last three weeks — the kind that meant something was coming. A different kind. The kind that arrives when something very large has stopped moving and the air hasn’t figured out what to do with the space yet.Romano Voss was dead.I read the message twice.Looked at Caden.His face was doing something I hadn’t seen before — not grief exactly, not relief exactly, the specific expression of a man processing the end of something that had been a defining force in his life for forty-two years. Like losing a war and a compass simultaneously. Like the thing you’d been fighting against was also the thing that had been telling you which direction to face and now both were gone at once.“Caden,” I said quietly.He looked at the phone.Then he set it down on the counter very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands aren’t entirely reliable, and stood there for a moment with both palms flat on the surface.