All Chapters of THE VEILED BRIDE : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

51 Chapters

THE MARK SHE DIDN'T HIDE

"The most dangerous questions are the ones you never thought to ask." KIVAI told myself I was overthinking.I repeated it on the drive home like something I was trying to make true through repetition alone. The robbery had been terrifying. Someone had died right in front of me, close enough that her blood had stained the hem of my dress, close enough that I had felt the displaced air of the gunshot. Of course my emotions were distorted. Of course everything felt larger and more significant than it was. Trauma did that. It took ordinary things and made them look like evidence of something worse.Fabian loved me.Three years. Three years of phone calls taken in secret because I had not been ready to give my family anything else to use against me. Three years of him remembering my birthday when everyone in this house forgot it without embarrassment. Three years of him looking at me across rooms full of people who looked through me and making me feel, in a way I had no other source for,

DAUGHTER OF KIRAMAN

"SOMETIMES THE ANSWER YOU NEED IS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU WANT TO LOOK." DAMIENThe city lights blurred beyond the tinted windows in long smears of gold and white, the Western Gates doing what cities did at night, continuing without concern for anything happening inside a black SUV moving through its streets.I stared at the tablet in my hand.Hours of footage. Hours of working through every angle the store's system had captured, every camera in the jewelry district, every feed from the surrounding businesses that my people had quietly obtained before the police finished processing the scene. I had gone through all of it with the focused patience of someone who understood that what he was looking for was there, that it simply required enough time and enough attention to locate.Except it was not there.The security cameras inside the jewelry store had been tampered with before the robbery began. Not during, not in the chaos of the shooting. Before. Whoever had organized the robbery had

THINGS I WAS NO SUPPOSED TO NOTICE

"THE TRUTH ALWAYS FINDS ITS WAY OUT. THE ONLY QUESTION IS HOW MUCH DAMAGE IT DOES GETTING THERE." KIVAThe morning started with disappointment.Again.I was already dressed when the message arrived, sitting on the edge of my bed with my hair done and my bag ready, having spent twenty minutes deciding between two outfits before landing on the one I thought he liked better. Small preparations. The kind that nobody saw but that mattered to the person making them, because they were the physical evidence of looking forward to something.Can't make lunch today, Sweet Pea. Something came up.I read it twice. Then a third time, in case the meaning changed on further examination. It did not.I set the phone in my lap and sat with it for a moment. Then I made myself smile, the deliberate kind that started with a decision rather than a feeling, and typed back that it was fine, good luck with work, and meant both things as much as I could manage.His reply came four hours later.I tried not to t

THE WRONG HOSPITAL

“THE DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE IS NEVER JUST MILES." KIVA.My hand hurt.Not the sharp kind anymore. That had faded in the first day or two, replaced by something duller and more persistent, the kind of pain that lived beneath the skin and declined every invitation to leave. The cut from the glass in the hallway had not healed the way it should have. The skin around it had gone red and slightly swollen, warm to the touch in a way that suggested my body was working harder on it than a small cut warranted, and even simple things, holding a cup, turning a door handle, pressing my palm flat against anything, produced a low steady ache I had been ignoring with decreasing success.I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at it in the grey morning light and thought about all the things I had been ignoring with decreasing success lately and decided this was the only one I was going to address today.My phone buzzed.Fabian's name on the screen produced the same small lift it always had, the

THE END OF US

"SOME ENDINGS DON'T ARRIVE WITH THUNDER. THEY ARRIVE QUIETLY, IN A HOSPITAL HALLWAY, WEARING THE FACE OF SOMEONE YOU LOVED."KIVAI could not hear properly.Everyone was talking. My father's voice, my mother's, Giovanni's somewhere behind me, Paige saying something I could not locate the edges of. Even Bryan, near the door, contributing something to the conversation in the measured tone of someone who had been briefed on his role. All of it reached me as if through water, muffled and distant, the words breaking apart before they could fully form into meaning.Pregnant.Paige is pregnant.Fabian's child.I kept placing those words beside each other and they kept refusing to arrange themselves into something I could hold. They made grammatical sense. They followed a logical sequence. And yet some part of me kept insisting on the gap between words making sense and words being true, kept waiting for the correction, for the moment where someone in this room said wait, no, we need to explai

ENOUGH

"The most dangerous person in the room is not the one who is angry. It's the one who has finally run out of things to lose."KIVAThe walk home felt endless.Every step produced a specific inventory of pain. My knees had taken the worst of the pavement when I jumped from Bryan's car, the skin scraped raw and pulling with every movement, my trousers sticking slightly where the blood had dried. My infected hand throbbed with its own persistent rhythm, separate from everything else, a reminder that my body had been trying to tell me something was wrong for days and I had been too preoccupied with other varieties of wrong to listen. And my chest, which did not hurt in any way I could locate or name, felt hollow in the specific way of a space that had recently held something and had not yet adjusted to its absence.I walked because walking was the only thing available to me.No friends. That was the plain truth of it, arrived at without drama. I had not been permitted friends in the way th

THE NIGHT EVERYTHING BROKE

"Sometimes the people who destroy you aren't your enemies. They're the ones who call themselves family."KIVAGiovanni's hand closed around my arm so hard I felt it in my shoulder."Kiva." His voice filled the room the way it always filled rooms, with the particular force of someone who had never needed to question whether he would be heard. "Have you finally lost your mind?"I yanked my arm away.The movement surprised both of us. I could see it in his face, the brief recalibration, the flicker of something that was almost confusion before it hardened back into the familiar contempt. Giovanni had been grabbing my arms since I was old enough to have arms worth grabbing, and in all those years I had never once pulled away from him. I had absorbed it. Learned to go still and wait for it to be over, the way you learned to wait out weather.I was done waiting."No," I said. My voice shook and I let it shake because the shaking was real and I was done performing steadiness for people who d

"MINE."

"I searched for her through dreams, through shadows, through years of silence. I never imagined I would find her broken."DAMIENI should have brought a driver.Or Ares, who would have complained the entire way and eaten something from a paper bag and filled the silence with commentary I did not ask for and could not entirely bring myself to resent. Or any one of the guards who were currently stationed throughout the Western Gates territory, all of whom had been specifically assigned to accompany me and all of whom I had told to stay behind.The road stretched ahead of me through the dark, the lights of the outer residential districts casting intervals of orange across the pavement, and I drove and let the silence do what I had wanted it to do, which was give me space to think without management.It was not cooperating.The Kiraman daughter.The store manager's words had not left me since the moment they were spoken. A daughter of the Kiraman family. Not a name. Not a face. Not an add

UNDER MY PROTECTION

"The most dangerous promise is not 'I love you.' It's 'No one will hurt you again.'"DAMIENThe hospital staff had approximately four seconds to register who had walked through their emergency doors before fear made them useful.I did not announce myself. I never did. The crest on my jacket was enough, and the quality of the silence that fell when people recognised it was enough, and the particular way I moved through spaces that were not built for what I was tended to communicate everything that needed communicating before I said a word."Get a doctor."The nurse at the desk froze for precisely the wrong amount of time."Now."She moved. Everyone moved. Within seconds the emergency wing had reorganised itself around us, doctors appearing with the efficiency of people who understood that the speed of their response was directly related to the quality of their evening.I laid her on the hospital bed.The reluctance of it surprised me. Some instinct I had not given permission to operate

AND THE TABLES BEGIN TO TURN...

"The most confusing kind of kindness is the one that arrives after a lifetime of cruelty."KIVAMy head hurt.That was the first thing. Before awareness of anything else, before location or time or the question of how I had arrived wherever I was, there was the pain, sharp and specific, sitting directly behind my eyes with the particular insistence of something that intended to be the first and last thing I thought about for a while.I groaned and pressed my face deeper into the pillow.Then stopped.The pillow was soft.Not the specific flatness of my pillow, the one that had been inadequate for so long I had stopped noticing it the way you stopped noticing permanent discomforts, the ones that had simply become the texture of your life. This was different. The kind of soft that suggested someone had made a decision about this pillow, had chosen it deliberately from among other options, had considered the comfort of whoever would eventually sleep on it.I had not slept on a pillow lik

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