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THAT'S NOT AN APOLOGY
publish date:
2026-03-31 16:58:39
Latest chapter
CONTRACTED TO THE DON...AND HIS TWIN AFTER DINNER
The guests leave at eleven. I hear them from my room. Voices at the door, laughing, saying their goodbyes. Then the door closes and the penthouse goes quiet and I just sit on the edge of my bed in the cream dress and stare at the floor. No tears. I thought there'd be tears. There's just nothing. Like I used everything up at that table and came back empty. I take the pins out of my hair and drop them on the nightstand one by one. Shake my hair loose. That's the most like myself I've felt since this morning. I'm reaching for the zip at the back of my dress when the door opens. No knock. Never a knock. Nico stands in the doorway with his jacket gone and his collar open and his eyes on me across the room. I go still with my arm twisted behind my back still reaching for a zip I can't get to. He looks at me for a moment then crosses the room and stops behind me and unzips the dress in one smooth pull like he's done it a hundred times. Because he has. "You did well tonight," he says
CONTRACTED TO THE DON...AND HIS TWIN THAT'S WHAT I KEEP HER FOR
He tells me at breakfast. Casual. Like he's telling me it might rain. "We have guests tonight. Eight o'clock. Help the staff set up." I look at him. He's already looking at his phone. "The tables, the flowers, the bar cart." He turns a page. "Cora will direct you." He leaves. His coffee cup is still on the counter. He didn't finish it. He just left it there for someone else to deal with. I look at my eggs. He has staff for this. Three people whose entire purpose in this penthouse is exactly what he just handed to me. He knows that. I know that. I pick up his cup and wash it myself because if I don't move my hands right now I'm going to sit here and feel things I can't afford to feel before nine in the morning. Cora doesn't look at me the whole time. That's the part that gets under my skin more than the instructions themselves. She holds her clipboard and tells me where things go and I can see it on her face — that specific discomfort of a person being made to participate in
CONTRACTED TO THE DON...AND HIS TWIN NICO
I was dismissed like staff after service. I stand up. Smooth my dress. Walk toward the door. "Aurora." I stop. Turn. Nico is looking at me from across the room with something in his face I haven't seen before. Not warm exactly. More like the very beginning of a question he hasn't finished forming yet. "You did well," he says. I hold his gaze for exactly the right amount of time. "Thank you," I say. And walk out. I make it to my room before my hands start shaking. Not from fear. From the effort of holding everything still for ninety minutes while men talked around me like furniture and I sat there being the domestic picture and smiling and collecting and swallowing every single thing that wanted to come up. I sit on the edge of the bed and press my palms flat on my thighs and breathe. Three names. Two locations. One shipping route. One figure. I go over them in my head until they're locked. Then I go over them again. Then I sit with my hands pressed flat and think about my
CONTRACTED TO THE DON...AND HIS TWIN WITHOUT EXISTING
I wake up before the sun. That's been happening since I got here. My body refuses to sleep past five, like some part of me decided that unconsciousness is too close to surrender and keeps pulling me back up before the penthouse gets a chance to feel normal. I lie in the big bed staring at the ceiling and listen to the city sixty floors below doing its early morning things and wait for my heartbeat to settle into something that feels less like running. It takes a while. Last night sits on my chest the way last nights have been sitting on my chest since the wedding. That specific weight that isn't quite shame and isn't quite grief but borrows from both of them. My body still warm from things I didn't fully choose and couldn't fully stop wanting and the two of them living somewhere in this penthouse right now sleeping the sleep of men who don't carry what happened the way I carry it. They don't have to. That's what bought means. It means they put it down when they're done and I'm st
CONTRACTED TO THE DON...AND HIS TWIN THAT'S NOT AN APOLOGY
Dinner at seven means I'm in my seat at six fifty-five.Not because I'm eager. Because being late means Nico's eyes sliding to me when I walk in with that flat quiet look that isn't anger yet but is the thing that lives right before it. I've learned his warning signs the way you learn weather. The sky doesn't have to be storming for you to know it's coming.I'm in a simple dress, hair down, no jewelry. I stopped wearing the red stone after the gala. Nobody has mentioned it.Matteo is already at the table when I come in. Black shirt, sleeves pushed up, looking at his phone with the focused stillness he brings to everything. He glances up when I sit down. Doesn't say anything. Goes back to his phone.The bond hums.It's always humming now. I've stopped being surprised by it and started just living alongside it like a sound in the walls you can't locate and can't turn off. Tonight it's running at a frequency that feels almost warm and I don't look at Matteo when I notice that.Nico arriv
CONTRACTED TO THE DON...AND HIS TWIN BREAKFAST IN THE KITCHEN
I eat breakfast in the kitchen. Not because I want to. Because yesterday I made the mistake of walking into the dining room at eight in the morning, plate in hand, and Nico looked up from his coffee and said without even putting his phone down: “You eat in the kitchen or your room.” Then went back to scrolling like he hadn’t just said anything at all. I stood there for about three seconds. Then I turned around and went to the kitchen and ate standing at the counter because sitting felt too much like accepting it and I wasn’t ready to accept it yet. That was four days ago. I sit now. I’ve accepted it. The kitchen staff moves around me the way water moves around a rock. Not hostile. Just indifferent in that particular way of people who’ve been trained not to notice things. A woman named Rita who runs the morning shift has never once made eye contact with me. She puts my plate in front of me and my coffee beside it and goes back to whatever she was doing and that’s the whole of our r
CONTRACTED TO THE DON...AND HIS TWIN THURSDAY
I dressed myself. No stylist today. Just me standing in front of a wardrobe full of clothes I didn’t pick, running my hands across fabric that probably costs more than my mom’s first week at the facility. I grabbed the least revealing thing I could find...black dress, simple neckline, nothing flashy
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