FORBIDDEN LOVE
Aiden’s POV
Hearing her call my name completely erased whatever restraint I had left.
I lose control of myself and keep thrusting in and out of her.
I knew we were crossing a line we could never uncross, but seeing her completely caught up in the moment with me made it impossible to pull back. The ambient noise of the room faded into the background, replaced only by the erratic sound of our breathing and the sound of flesh hitting each other .
We were entirely consumed by the rush of the risks we were taking, pushing the limits until the tension finally broke.
"Aiden I'm so close."
And with one last thrust we both cum holding and moaning each other's name
I collapsed forward, completely exhausted, and too weak to get up.
Then, the heavy sound of the door swinging open cut through the silence like ice.
"What the fuck is going on here?"
My dad’s voice boomed from the doorway, thick with disbelief and fury. The blood instantly drained from my face as I turned to look at him. We were caught, and there was absolutely no explaining our way out of this.
The door hung open behind him, and for one unbearable second nobody moved. I felt Lily go rigid beside me, and some useless part of my brain still reached for her before I caught myself and pulled back instead, too late, always too late.
It wasn't anger on my father's face. That I could have handled. It was disappointment, raw and unguarded, the kind that carves itself into a man's expression and stays there — like watching someone realize, in real time, that the son he thought he knew had never really existed.
She was supposed to be my stepsister
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Chapter: Chapter Sixty-TwoLILY'S POV The house felt different walking in that evening — same gravel drive, same too-tall hedges, but every lamp in the living room blazing like Richard had wanted no shadows left anywhere by the time we arrived.Mom was already there when Aiden and I came in together, sitting rigid on the edge of the couch, her eyes flicking to our joined hands and holding there a beat too long before she said nothing at all about it. Richard stood near the fireplace, a folder clutched in one hand, looking older than I'd ever seen him."Sit," he said, voice rough. "Please."We sat. Nobody spoke for a long moment, the four of us arranged like a jury waiting on a verdict nobody wanted to hear."Eleven years ago," Richard began, "I was approached by a man who offered to help me solve a cash flow problem at Prescott Holdings. Quietly. Off the books. I was younger, more desperate than I've ever admitted to anyone, and I said yes before I fully understood what I was agreeing to.""Who," Aiden said."
Last Updated: 2026-11-02
Chapter: Chapter Sixty-OneLILY'S POV Noon came and went without a word from Richard.Aiden called twice, texted once, and got nothing back each time — not even the courtesy of *I need more time*, just silence stretching longer than either of us could sit with comfortably. By one, he'd made the decision to drive to the house himself, and by two, I'd made my own decision, one that had been sitting in my chest since the night before.I was going to ask my mother directly.---She was in the garden when I got there, kneeling in the dirt with gloves on, humming something under her breath the way she always did when she thought no one was listening. She looked up when my shadow fell across her work, surprised and pleased at once."This is a nice surprise," she said, sitting back on her heels. "You didn't mention coming by.""I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually answer me honestly, even if it's hard." I sat down on the garden bench across from her, my heart already pounding. "About Dad. About befo
Last Updated: 2026-11-02
Chapter: Chapter Sixty LILY'S POV He got there in under ninety minutes, which should have been impossible and somehow wasn't, and I met him at the lobby door still shaking slightly, more from the adrenaline crash than actual cold."I'm here," he said, pulling me into him the second the door opened, and I let myself hold on longer than I normally would have, needing the solid, certain weight of him after an hour of sitting alone with my own fear.We didn't talk about it properly until we were upstairs, door locked, Priya finally convinced to try sleeping in her own room now that Aiden was there. He sat across from me at the kitchen table, the same table where Rourke's call had landed like a verdict two days ago, and something in his face told me he'd been carrying more than he'd said on the phone."Tell me what happened with your father," I said. "All of it. No editing this time."So he told me — Richard's confession about Marcus Keene, the settlement, the fire that apparently hadn't been an accident at all
Last Updated: 2026-11-02
Chapter: Chapter Fifty-Nine**AIDEN'S POV**Richard was still awake when I got there, light on in his study, the particular late-night stillness of a man who didn't sleep well anymore either.He looked up when I came in without knocking, something already bracing in his expression, like he'd been waiting for this exact conversation for longer than tonight."Marcus Keene is dead," I said, no preamble. "Six months ago. Car accident, late at night, no witnesses, case closed without a real investigation. I want to know if you had anything to do with that."Richard went very still, the color draining slowly from his face. "Where did you hear that name.""Don't do that. Don't ask me questions instead of answering mine." My voice came out harder than I'd planned, something raw underneath it that had been building since the moment Rourke said *six months ago*. "Vanessa remembered overhearing her father arguing with you about him, years back. We found his old employment record. Senior financial officer, gone the same yea
Last Updated: 2026-11-02
Chapter: Chapter Fifty-Eight — The Missing EmployeeAIDEN'S POV None of us slept properly that night. I kept my phone in my hand until nearly four in the morning, running searches until the screen blurred, Lily beside me on the laptop doing the same thing, both of us too wired on adrenaline and fear to let exhaustion win. Priya dozed fitfully on the far end of the couch, refusing to go to her own room alone, and I didn't blame her. None of us wanted to be alone that night.By sunrise we had almost nothing — Marcus Keene's name existed in exactly one place online, a single archived employee directory, and nowhere else. No social media. No current address. No obituary, which I'd braced for and found somehow worse not finding."People don't just vanish," Lily said, rubbing her eyes, her voice stripped raw from hours of circling the same dead ends. "Not completely. Everyone leaves a trail somewhere.""Unless someone made sure they didn't." I set my phone down, something cold and certain settling into my chest. "I have an idea. I don't lov
Last Updated: 2026-11-02
Chapter: Chapter Fifty-SevenAIDEN'S POV The drive felt longer than two hours. It always did, lately, whenever something was waiting on the other end that neither of us wanted to find.We got to the apartment a little after midnight, and the street was empty — no dark sedan, no sign of anyone, just Priya waiting at the window with the porch light on and her arms wrapped around herself like she'd been standing there the whole time we'd been driving."It left about twenty minutes ago," she said, the second we got inside. "I watched it pull away. I'm sorry, I probably should've just called the second it happened instead of letting it sit.""You're okay. That's what matters." I pulled her into a hug, feeling her shake slightly, the adrenaline of the last few hours finally catching up to both of us at once. "Did you get a plate number? Anything?""It was too dark. I tried, I swear I tried, but all I could really tell you is dark sedan, tinted windows, parked close enough to see our window but not close enough that I
Last Updated: 2026-10-31
Chapter: CHAPTER 75: The Absolute VariableMAYAThe problem was one I had found in a paper about tidal flow in narrow estuaries, and it had nothing to do with anything.I had been working on it since seven.The kitchen island was covered with my notes — three pages of scribbled calculations, a pen without a cap, a mug of coffee Adrian had made at half past six that had gone cold. The laptop was propped on a stack of books because the stand had broken in November and neither of us had replaced it. The window was open a crack because I had burned something the night before and the smell had not entirely gone.The paper said the solution was trivial. It was not trivial. It had been bothering me for four days.There was nothing on the calendar until Thursday. No filing, no hearing, no letter that had to be answered before a certain date. The foundation had forty-one grantees and an administrator who handled the correspondence. The lectureship had eighteen students and a syllabus I had written in February. None of it was the kind o
Last Updated: 2026-11-03
Chapter: CHAPTER 74: The TerraceADRIANI had carried the ring in my coat pocket for eleven days.It was not an expensive ring. It was a thin band of white gold with a single small stone, and I had chosen it in a shop on the Rennweg in nine minutes because the woman behind the counter had shown me four trays and I had known within the first tray that anything larger would have been an insult.Maya does not wear jewellery. She has never worn jewellery. She wears a watch that her father left her and nothing else.I knew that before I went into the shop. I went anyway.---I did not plan the evening.That is not true. I planned it eleven times and discarded eleven versions. A restaurant. A weekend in the Valais. A walk along the lake at the point where the lights come on. Each of them was a performance, and each of them would have required her to react to the performance rather than to the question, and I did not want her reacting to anything.So on the eleventh evening I did nothing.She was at the table with the Halvo
Last Updated: 2026-11-03
Chapter: CHAPTER 73: Zurich NightsMAYAThe pasta was a disaster.I put the water on at half past six and forgot about it until the pot had boiled dry and the bottom had gone brown, and Adrian came into the kitchen to find me holding the pot at arm's length under the tap while the smoke alarm went off in the hall.He did not laugh. He opened the window, took the pot out of my hands, and put it in the sink."We'll use the other one," he said."There isn't another one.""Then we'll use the frying pan.""You can't boil pasta in a frying pan.""You can if you're determined."---We boiled pasta in a frying pan. It took twice as long and came out with a texture somewhere between chalk and rubber, and the sauce came from a jar that had been in the cupboard since before either of us had moved in, and we ate it at the kitchen table at nine o'clock with the window still open and the cold coming in."It's terrible," I said."It's terrible.""Say it's fine.""It is not fine. It is the worst pasta I have eaten in a decade." He put
Last Updated: 2026-11-03
Chapter: CHAPTER 72: The SummitMAYAThe Great Hall of the Zurich Directorate had not changed since the afternoon I stood at the brass lectern and defended a thesis against five senior directors and a hostile panel member who wanted me broken.The granite was the same. The reinforced glass was the same. The tiered oak gallery behind the bench was the same, though it was fuller now — three hundred delegates from eleven clearinghouse authorities, the European Economic Council, the Swiss Financial Authority, and a bank of translators in glass booths along the eastern wall.What had changed was where I stood.I sat at the centre of the dais, in the high-backed chair that Director Weber had occupied for nineteen years. Weber had retired in December. He had written to me once, a short letter on Directorate stationery, saying that the model was the most significant piece of quantitative architecture of his career and that he was glad he had lived long enough to see it ratified. I had written back. I had not expected to fee
Last Updated: 2026-11-03
Chapter: CHAPTER 71: The Public RecordCHAPTER 71: The Public RecordMAYAThe request came through the foundation's general inbox on a Tuesday and sat there for four days before anyone flagged it.A financial journalist from one of the European papers — the kind that prints on salmon paper and is read by people who work in glass buildings — wanted to write a profile of the Lin-Vance Model and the woman who had authored it. Twelve hundred words. One photograph. No conditions.I said no twice before I said yes.---Her name was Hanna Vestergaard and she came to the office on the Limmatquai on a Thursday afternoon in February with a small recorder and a paper notebook she did not open.She was in her forties and had done this for a long time and did not pretend otherwise. She asked about the model first — the architecture, the recursive loop, the seventeen months of sandbox testing. She asked about the hearing and wrote down the dates. She asked about Halvorsen and Steinhauser and the nine deployments and whether I thought th
Last Updated: 2026-11-03
Chapter: CHAPTER 70: The First GrantMAYAThe Halvorsen application had been on my desk for three weeks.It was two pages and a curriculum vitae and a covering letter in English with a Swedish syntax that made the sentences go the long way round. She was forty-four now. She had spent six years in a bookshop in Bologna and three years before that in a rented room in Uppsala and the intervening time writing a book she had not been able to find a publisher for.The application was for one hundred and twenty thousand francs to complete a manuscript on sovereign debt restructuring.The model that had nearly collapsed three clearinghouses. Rewritten. Cleaned. Finished.I approved it at ten in the morning and called her at noon.She answered in Italian and I asked whether she spoke English and she said she did and then she was quiet for a while."I did not think it would be funded," she said."Why did you apply?""Because a woman called Steinhauser wrote to me and told me what you had done." A pause. "She said I should apply. S
Last Updated: 2026-11-03
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