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Chapter 36

Author: Josh OA
last update Petsa ng paglalathala: 2026-04-03 15:28:06

POV: Nora

I showed Elias the message from Sera.

He read it once and his expression did the thing it did when he was managing a response before allowing it to show. Then he set the phone down and said, "You're not going alone."

"She said come alone."

"She said if I come with you she won't be there. That's a different thing. I'll have someone positioned nearby who isn't me." He was already moving toward the operational register, the one where everything became logistics. "She's been compromis
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    POV: Nora He said my father had asked him to watch over me. I sat with that for a long moment. The photographs still spread on the desk between us, three years of quiet surveillance that had been framed as protection and authorized by a man I couldn't ask about it because he was dead. "My father knew Marcus had identified me," I said. "Three years ago." "He suspected. He wasn't certain. But he knew enough to want someone watching." Elias came into the study slowly, the way you move around something that might break. "He didn't tell you because he didn't want you frightened before there was something specific to be frightened of. He thought he could resolve it before it reached you." "He didn't resolve it." "No." I looked at the photographs again. The one of me at his grave. Standing alone on a Sunday morning thinking I was private in my grief, and Elias somewhere behind a lens thirty feet away, doing what my father had asked. I should have stopped there. I should have taken th

  • Bred for Betrayal    Chapter 42

    POV: Nora I didn't ask him about the first page in the café. I waited until we were in the car and moving, and then I asked. He told me about Chen's superior, the name, the connection, what it meant for the case. He explained it in the operational register, clean and structured, the way he explained everything that required me to process information rather than feel it. What he didn't explain was why he had agreed to Jade's terms after reading one page when thirty seconds earlier I had set a clear condition and he had confirmed it. I sat with that on the drive back. Let him talk through the implications of Chen's superior being connected to the Syndicate, the way it compromised the wire recording motion, the way it reframed Chen's involvement and how much of her operation we could trust. All of it was real and relevant and required attention. And all of it was also, I noticed, filling the space where a different conversation could have happened. He dropped me at the hotel and sa

  • Bred for Betrayal    Chapter 41

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  • Bred for Betrayal    Chapter 40

    POV: Nora I showed Elias the message from Jade before he came back inside. I texted it to him while he was still in the corridor making calls, and thirty seconds later his footsteps came back through the door faster than they'd left. He read it standing up, phone in hand, and I watched him process the double contact, Jade reaching out to him anonymously through one channel and to me directly through another, and understand what it meant. "She's splitting us," he said. "She's trying to." I kept my voice level. "She sent me a direct threat and she sent you a business proposition. Both on the same day. She wants to see which of us moves first and whether we move together or separately." He looked at the message on my phone again. "What she has for you specifically." "I don't know. Could be the bar photograph. Could be something else she's been holding." I took the phone back. "Could be nothing and the threat is the whole play." "It's not nothing." He sat across from me. "A woman r

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  • Bred for Betrayal    Chapter 38

    POV: Nora I put the phone face down on the table. Not because I wanted to hide it from Marcus. Because whoever had sent that photograph had been standing outside this window in the last ten minutes, and that was a more immediate problem than anything happening inside the bar. I looked at the window. The street beyond it was ordinary, people moving, no one standing still in the way of someone who had just taken a photograph and was waiting to see the response. They were already gone. They had sent it and walked away, which meant the point wasn't surveillance. The point was to make me aware that I was being watched and by someone who knew both my location and Elias's name. Marcus was looking at my face. "What's wrong." "Nothing." I put the phone in my bag. "You were saying." He looked at the bag for a moment, then at me, and let it go. "I was saying that I know what I've done. Not the version my lawyers have constructed, not the framing that makes it a clean business arrangement.

  • Bred for Betrayal    Chapter 21

    POV: Nora I moved from the bathroom to the bedroom closet in the four seconds between hearing Jade's heels cross the living room and reach the hallway. It was the only option. The bathroom had no lock on the inside worth anything, and if she opened that door I had nowhere to go and no explanation

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    POV: NoraThe anonymous text had been the push Elias needed.He'd been tracking Jade peripherally since the gala, building a file the same way he built all his files, patiently, from the outside in. But the bruises I'd described and the text that followed moved her from background to active. Someon

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