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Chapter Seven: The Price Of Silence
Last Updated:
2025-08-17 11:59:32
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Ashes Don't Bleed Chapter Thirty-eight: The Sea That Remembered Her Name
Damien didn’t move for a long moment after she spoke.I want to leave Italy.The words hung between them like a blade suspended by a single hair.Amara’s breathing had steadied, but only barely. Her chest still rose too fast. Her fingers still twitched from aftershocks. The kitchen still smelled faintly of cold marble, sea wind, and her fear.She hated that he’d seen her like this again. Hated that Italy had dragged her back into a nightmare she’d buried with grit and therapy and oceans of distance.But more than that—She hated how gently he still held her, as if some part of him remembered exactly how to keep her from breaking.Damien finally spoke, voice low.“Not tonight.”It wasn’t a refusal.It wasn’t acceptance.It was a delay.Amara stiffened in his arms.“Let me go,” she murmured.He did. Instantly. As if her skin had burned him.She pushed herself to sit upright, back against the cabinet. Damien stayed crouched in front of her, but now there was distance. Space for dignity.
Ashes Don't Bleed Chapter Thirty-seven: THE NIGHT ITALY OPENED OLD WOUNDS
Italy didn’t sleep.Not really.And neither did Amara.She sat on the edge of the guest bed hours after storming out of Damien’s study, staring at the open balcony doors where the moonlight washed the marble floor in cold silver. The same room she once healed in. The same room she once broke in.The same room where she learned to breathe again after almost drowning.It should’ve felt safe.Instead it felt like a ribcage tightening around her.Tomorrow she would leave.She didn’t decide it—she knew it, like knowing the tide would return.Amara would go back to the Amalfi hills, to the mansion where Ethan had kissed her, lied to her, and shoved her off a cliff like she was disposable weight.She would search the place herself.Maybe she wouldn’t find proof of her attempted murder—not after a year.Maybe she wouldn’t find anything tying Sienna to Milo’s death.Maybe everything had already been cleaned, erased, scrubbed with bleach and Cade money.Fine.Then she’d look for something else.
Ashes Don't Bleed Chapter Thirty-six: The Man Behind The Quiet
The Rhys estate swallowed sound the way the ocean swallowed secrets—completely.Once the doors shut behind them, the villa’s interior felt colder, darker, almost monastic. High ceilings. Stone walls. Shadows that moved as if they had their own breath.Damien walked ahead of her without asking if she would follow.Amara followed without asking why.A strange symmetry, for two people who shared nothing but a growing ledger of silent debts.He led her into a vast study lit by low amber lamps. Books lined the walls. Old maps. A fireplace with dying embers. A room built for power—and for hiding it.Damien turned to her slowly.“Ask,” he said. Not inviting. Not warning.Just… accepting inevitability.Amara stepped closer, chin high, grief buried under iron.“Who are you, Damien?”He didn’t answer.Not with words.Not with a shift of expression.Not even with a tell-tale flicker in his eyes.He simply watched her—like a man waiting to see how much of herself she was willing to spill to get a
Ashes Don't Bleed Chapter Thirty-five: Ashes Don't Lie
ITALY Italy breathed differently.Not like California's sharp glass-and-steel lungs, nor Cade City’s greedy metallic rhythm.Italy breathed slowly. Deeply. Like a land that had seen too much and decided to carry its grief with elegance.The jet touched down at a private airfield outside Salerno. When Amara stepped out, dusk kissed her skin, warm and orange, carrying the faint scent of sea salt and old stone. But she didn’t stop to inhale. Didn’t lift her face to the sun.Grief did not allow indulgence.She walked past the waiting car without a word. The driver scrambled to open the back door, but Amara slid into the front seat instead, eyes fixed straight ahead, voice low and clipped—deadly in its composure.“To the cemetery.”Those three words turned the air inside the car grave-cold.The drive took thirty minutes. Amara didn’t speak once. Not when the coastline appeared in glittering strokes. Not when they passed lemon groves glowing gold. Not when they cut through the narrow ancie
Ashes Don't Bleed Chapter Thirty-four: The Wolves Start Running
Ethan Cade did not drink coffee.He consumed it.Like ammunition.Shot after shot.Cup after cup.And tonight, his desk was littered with the husks—porcelain soldiers slain in battle—evidence of the war he had been fighting for hours without pause.The skyline outside his office windows bled gold into midnight, skyscrapers gleaming like polished blades. The Cade Enterprises tower stood tallest, proudest, its crown touching the sky like it owned the damn hemisphere.Tonight, though, ownership felt… negotiable.He’d been pacing for nearly three hours, one hand buried in his hair, the other holding the remnants of yet another cappuccino he didn’t remember finishing. His usually flawless shirt was wrinkled, sleeves shoved past his elbows, tie discarded entirely.His empire was bleeding.Barely.But bleeding all the same.And that was unacceptable.Completely. Absolutely. Violently unacceptable.Ethan halted mid-stride, eyes darting across the scattered reports on his desk—projections, los
Ashes Don't Bleed Chapter Thirty-three: coffee, secrets and ghosts II
The silence between them thickened, humming like a struck wire. For the first time since she walked into the café, Amara—Elara—felt the ground tilt underneath her. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even shock. It was that old, sour taste of a life she had buried with her own hands trying to claw its way back up through the dirt. Daelan waited until her fingers stopped digging into her palms before he finally spoke. “I need a favor,” he said quietly. The word favor tasted wrong coming from him. From her little experience with him, she knew he wasn’t a man who asked for things. He extracted them. Strategized them. Bent circumstances until they surrendered. Hearing him ask… it set off alarms. Amara raised her chin, expression cold again. “You’re going to have to try harder than blackmail-by-name, Daelan.” “It’s about Damien.” Her brows twitched, just barely. She sat back, arms folding, irritation cutting clean through the lingering shock. “Oh please. I don’t know him. You said it yours
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