LOGINShare
Chapter 10: Elias Enters
publish date:
2026-03-14 15:21:04
Latest chapter
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 92: What She Left
POV: Nora Katherine died on a Tuesday morning, eleven days after the hospital admission, with the same precise control she had brought to every other moment of her life. The hospital called her lawyer, who called Marsh, who called me, and the chain of information felt fitting somehow for a woman whose life had been built entirely on the careful management of who knew what and when. I hadn't visited her during those eleven days. I had thought about it once, briefly, and decided against it. Whatever closure existed between us had happened in the members club, in the testimony she'd given at the custody hearing. I didn't owe her a deathbed scene, and I suspected she wouldn't have wanted one either, preferring to be remembered through actions rather than performed sentiment. The funeral was small. Marcus, escorted under supervision for the day with permission granted under compassionate grounds, stood at the graveside in handcuffs that the facility had allowed to be covered by his jac
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 91: Some People
POV: Nora Marsh's call about Katherine took twenty minutes and gave me more questions than answers. The Roland Vance investigation had uncovered financial records suggesting Katherine had not simply approved the Syndicate's operations from a distance, as everyone had assumed, but had directed several key decisions personally, including ones made after Marcus had supposedly taken over leadership. Marsh said it would take weeks to confirm fully and that nothing required my action yet. I thanked her and put the phone down and let it sit at the edges of my attention rather than the center, because I had learned by now which fires actually needed me standing over them and which could wait their turn. Jade's release happened three days later. I learned about it through a call from the facility's victim notification system, the automated kind that existed to inform people connected to a case when a relevant party's status changed. She had served her sentence, reduced through the cooperat
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 90: Letters
POV: Nora Aria's fever turned out to be nothing serious, a virus working through her system that needed two days of rest and fluids and the particular patience required to comfort a toddler who didn't understand why her body felt wrong. I took the two days off the studio without hesitation, sat with her through the worst of it, and by the third morning she was back to her usual self, demanding specific socks and negotiating breakfast terms like nothing had happened. The letter from Marcus arrived during those two days, sitting unread on the kitchen counter until I had the bandwidth to open it. He had been granted expanded letter-writing privileges a month earlier, something his lawyer had mentioned in passing during a routine update about the foundation's progress. The facility had reviewed his conduct record and approved additional correspondence allowances, a small but specific marker of the kind of trust that accumulated slowly inside a system built to be skeptical of exactly t
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 89: Co-Parenting Therapy
POV: Nora The court-ordered co-parenting session had been on the calendar for three weeks before it actually happened, scheduled as part of the six month review the original custody determination had required. I had assumed it would be procedural, a box to check, twenty minutes of a counselor confirming we could communicate about Aria without incident. It turned out to be a full hour, weekly, with an actual therapist who had opinions about how we were doing it wrong. Her name was Dr. Patel and her office had two chairs angled slightly toward each other instead of facing directly, which she explained on the first visit was deliberate, designed to reduce the confrontational quality of direct eye contact while still allowing connection. Elias sat in his chair with the careful posture of someone used to controlling a room and finding himself in one he couldn't. "Tell me how communication has been going," Dr. Patel said, looking between us. "Functional," Elias said. "We coordinate sc
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 88: Test Me
POV: Nora I told Leo the following week that I wasn't going to keep seeing him romantically. I did it kindly, in person, over coffee rather than dinner because dinner had started to feel like a setting that implied something the relationship wasn't building toward. He took it well, with the same steady grace he brought to everything, and said he understood and that he hoped we could stay connected given the history between our families. I said I would like that too, and I meant it, and we left it there without drama. It felt like closing a door gently rather than slamming one. The right kind of ending. I didn't tell Elias right away. I needed a few days to sit with what I actually wanted to say before saying it, because the conversation in the doorway had opened something I wasn't ready to leave half finished. I went to the new building on a Tuesday afternoon, the security business that was still smelling faintly of fresh paint in places, and found him in his office reviewing so
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 87: Not Just
POV: Nora Marsh's message turned out to be about a financial detail, not a danger detail. Leo's classification had shifted from passive recipient of information to someone who had actively profited from timing his business moves around what he learned. It was a meaningful legal distinction but not one that suggested any threat to me personally, and Marsh confirmed that directly before I let myself spiral. I told her I appreciated knowing and went back to my actual life, which at that point involved a toddler with strong feelings about which socks were acceptable on a given morning. I kept seeing Leo through the following weeks. Not often, and with a clearer sense now of what the relationship was and wasn't. He remained kind. He remained level. The absence in my chest remained equally consistent, which was its own kind of useful information. Elias never said a word about it. That was the part that surprised me most. I had braced for the controlling version of him to surface the mo
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 45: Collected
POV: NoraSera wasn't available until morning.Her message came back twenty minutes after I called. Overnight movement was too risky, the two men who had found her previous location were still active, she needed to stay put until the building she was in confirmed clear. First light, she said. Come
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 6
Nora's POVI'm halfway to the police station when I realize I left my jacket at the shelter. The one with my documents in the pockets. Everything important. My ID. My copy of the surrogacy contract. The photo of the baby.I turn around and head back. The shelter is only six blocks but my body is sc
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 5
Nora's POVThe police station smells like burnt coffee and sweat. Detective Chen meets me at the front desk, leads me back to a small interview room with a table and two chairs. She closes the door behind us."You look terrible," she says."Thanks.""When's the last time you ate?"I try to remember
Bred for Betrayal Chapter 4
Nora's POVI spend the night at the shelter. Four hours of sleep on a cot that smells like bleach and desperation. My body is wrecked. Bleeding through the pads they give postpartum women. Breasts leaking. Everything hurts.But I drag myself up at seven because I need to meet Detective Chen at ten
You may also like
A Dangerous Atrophy
Qi River's Old Stream783.5K viewsHIS REGRET (Ex-Husband wants Me Back)
Major_Canis1.6M viewsThe Three Little Guardian Angels
Ginger Bud3.3M viewsSIN
MercyCrown1.1M viewsThe Billionaire's Frozen Heart
M.Serein52 viewsTwo Can Play
Rosa Kane75.7K viewsThe Thin Redline Between Love and Hate
Novella Wright36 viewsThe abandoned wife
Déesse102 views
