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The Morning After Shame

Auteur: Nurulwrytss
last update Date de publication: 2026-04-23 21:20:10

Chapter 7

(Sophia's POV)

Morning light cuts across the penthouse like a blade.

I wake up sore, sticky, and furious with myself.

My body aches in places I refuse to acknowledge; between my thighs, my hips where his fingers bruised me, my neck where his mouth left marks. The black silk sheets are tangled around my naked body, and the scent of him is everywhere. Sex and spice and victory.

Xander is gone.

Thank God.

I sit up slowly, wincing. The floor-to-ceiling windows mock me with the same view w
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  • Bound by Contract, Owned by Hate   Old Wounds Bleed Again

    Chapter 25 (Sophia's POV) Paris was beautiful in the morning. I'd forgotten that. Or perhaps I'd never properly noticed, every previous Paris trip had been consumed entirely by work, by collections, by the relentless forward momentum that had defined my life since I was twenty-two and Laurent Luxe was held together by determination and very little else. This morning I noticed. I stood on the hotel balcony with coffee and watched the city wake up slowly, the way cities that understood their own significance always did, unhurried and certain. Last night sat somewhere behind my sternum in a way I wasn't examining directly. Not yet. Izzy found me at breakfast in the hotel restaurant, slid into the chair across from mine and looked at me with the particular expression she reserved for things she'd already concluded and was deciding how to deliver. "The Vogue Paris piece is live," she said, setting her phone on the table. "Julian's interview, the collection coverage is

  • Bound by Contract, Owned by Hate   I Claimed Her Backstage

    Chapter 24 (Xander's POV) The applause was still audible from the front of house when I found her. Backstage had settled into the particular warmth of people who'd survived something together and come out the other side of it better than they'd started. Claire was accepting congratulations with the composure of someone who'd never doubted the outcome despite having every reason to. Izzy was photographing everything. Julian was speaking to the press coordinator near the exit. Sophia was moving through it all, touching shoulders, saying the right things to the right people, holding the room together the way she always held rooms together. She looked incandescent. I'd watched her rebuild an impossible morning into something extraordinary through nothing but will, intelligence and the refusal to accept any outcome she hadn't approved. And Victor had tried to take it from her. That thought had been sitting in my chest since Dax's confirmation and it wasn't sitting quietly.

  • Bound by Contract, Owned by Hate   The Fashion Show Disaster

    Chapter 23 (Sophia's POV) The Paris Fashion Week slot had been confirmed eight months ago. Laurent Luxe's autumn showcase, front row press and forty-two looks. Three years of creative direction finally converging into a single forty-minute presentation that would either cement our position as the most compelling luxury brand of the season or hand our competitors the narrative they'd been waiting for. Nothing was going wrong. Until everything did. It started at six-fifteen in the morning. Izzy called from the venue, a converted nineteenth century gallery in the eighth arrondissement that we'd spent three weeks transforming into exactly the right setting for the collection's visual language. "The lighting rig collapsed," she said. "Back third of the runway. Nobody's hurt but we've lost four of the twelve primary setups and the show is in eleven hours." I was already sitting up in bed. "How bad?" "Bad enough that Sebastian is currently using three different languages

  • Bound by Contract, Owned by Hate   She's Mine to Ruin

    Chapter 22 (Xander's POV) I didn't sleep well. Which was new. I'd built an entire life around the ability to compartmentalize, to set down whatever the day had delivered and return to it in the morning without carrying it through the dark hours in between. Sophia Laurent was systematically dismantling that ability. She'd said thank you. Two words. Quiet. Unperformed. And I'd stood in that kitchen long after she'd gone to bed running them through my mind with the focus I usually reserved for hostile acquisition targets. The problem was becoming undeniable. Richard was in office by seven-thirty with the Grant removal paperwork already drafted. Clean, procedural, nothing that would signal to Victor that we'd identified his information channel until we were ready to use that identification strategically. I reviewed it without comment. "Monday's agenda," I said. "I want Victor's proposed items in advance. Tell his office it's standard protocol for board adjacents."

  • Bound by Contract, Owned by Hate   I Hate How Much I Need Him

    Chapter 21 (Sophia's POV) The Monday board meeting with Victor was still four days away. Four days of maintaining the performance. Four days of sitting across breakfast from Xander Voss and pretending the fight we'd had hadn't rearranged something fundamental between us. Four days of pretending I didn't notice every time he looked at me. I noticed every time he looked at me. That was the problem stated plainly. Izzy found me staring at a mood board Tuesday afternoon without actually seeing it and pulled up a chair with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd been waiting for this conversation. "Talk," she said simply. "There's nothing to talk about." "You've been rearranging that mood board for forty minutes and you've put the cobalt swatch in the wrong column three times." She crossed her arms. "Talk." I sat back. "He told Victor's office I'd be at Monday's meeting," I said. "Without being asked." Izzy waited. "He acknowledged yesterday morning that he'd withh

  • Bound by Contract, Owned by Hate   First Real Fight

    Chapter 20 (Xander's POV) The fight started over breakfast. Which was perhaps the most ordinary thing that had happened since Sophia Laurent moved into my penthouse. It began with a photograph. Rachel Voss had published a piece in the Manhattan Chronicle that morning, not the romance coverage we'd been managing carefully, but something sharper. A corporate analysis framed around the merger timeline, the Phoenix Holdings threat and what she called "the convenient timing of a sudden love story between two lifelong enemies." Careful, pointed and professionally constructed. Sophia read it at the kitchen island while her coffee went cold. I'd already read it twice before she woke up. "She has a source," Sophia said without looking up. "Yes," I agreed. "Inside the merger legal team or inside Voss Group," she added. "Richard is already running it down," I told her. She set her phone face down on the counter. "This piece didn't come from curiosity. Someone handed her

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