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CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

Penulis: Wren Gray
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-04-02 00:43:36

“I AM SO FUCKING STUPID.”

ZYRAN.

I couldn't focus.

The meeting had been going on for forty-five minutes and I'd absorbed maybe ten percent of what was being said. Something about territory disputes in Brooklyn, expanding our operations into New Jersey, dealing with the Serpents who were getting bold again after we'd blown up their main warehouse last month.

Important stuff. Stuff that normally would have my full attention.

But all I could think about was her.

Myra.

And then I'd left her with n
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  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR

    "The most effective weapons are never the loudest ones."DAMONI had made one mistake.Just one. In forty years of operating in this world, of building something from nothing through patience and precision and a willingness to do what other men flinched from — one mistake.I had underestimated Zyran Theon.Not his power. I'd never underestimated that. I'd known from the beginning that a direct confrontation with the Kingsmen was a losing proposition, that my resources against theirs was an equation that didn't resolve in my favor. That had never been the plan. Direct confrontation was for men who hadn't learned that the most effective damage happened quietly, from angles nobody was watching.What I'd underestimated was his attachment.I'd assumed the marriage was strategic. That was reasonable — everything in our world was strategic, and Zyran Theon above all people was not a man who made decisions based on sentiment. I'd assumed the girl was a piece on a board, protected because her

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY THREE

    "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."MYRAIt was sitting on my pillow when I came to bed.Not wrapped elaborately, not presented with any kind of ceremony. Just there, on my side of the bed, a flat rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper with a small piece of twine around it. No bow. No card.I stood at the edge of the bed and looked at it for a moment.Zyran was in the bathroom, I could hear the shower running, and I had the particular feeling of someone who'd walked into a room and found something they hadn't been prepared for. Not alarming. Just — unexpected, in the specific way that made your heart do something before your brain had caught up enough to explain why.I sat down on the bed and picked it up.It was lighter than I expected. And slightly irregular in shape, not perfectly flat, which ruled out most obvious guesses. I turned it over in my hands once.Then I unwrapped it.The brown paper came away carefully, because I had always been a careful

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY TWO

    "The most romantic thing isn't grand gestures. It's being remembered in the small, ordinary details."MYRAHe knocked on my door at seven in the evening on a Wednesday.That was already unusual. Zyran didn't knock on my door at seven on Wednesdays. Wednesdays were call nights — he had standing meetings with various people that ran from five until sometimes ten, the kind of back to back scheduling that meant I usually saw him briefly at dinner and then not again until late. I'd learned the shape of his week the way you learned the layout of a house you lived in, knowing which rooms would be occupied at which hours without having to check.So when the knock came I was already slightly confused before I even opened the door.He was standing in the hallway in dark jeans and a black jacket instead of the work clothes he'd been in all day. No tie. His hair was slightly less formal than usual. He looked — almost casual, which on Zyran was a significant departure from the baseline."Get dress

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY ONE

    "The hardest thing about being wrong is watching the evidence pile up before you're ready to admit it."LUCAI'd been avoiding the Theon estate.That was deliberate. Three weeks of deliberate, conscious avoidance that I'd justified to myself in a dozen different ways — too busy, too much happening with the Serpents situation, too many things requiring my attention that weren't my sister and my best friend and the mess I'd made by putting them in the same house together.The real reason was simpler and less flattering.I wasn't ready to see them together and know what I knew now.Zyran had broken the one promise that had mattered. I'd built the entire arrangement around my certainty that he was incapable of wanting Myra the way he apparently wanted her, and I'd been wrong in a way that made every decision I'd made since look different in hindsight. I'd handed him the one person I'd spend my life protecting and told myself it was safe because he wouldn't feel anything.The man felt some

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER SIXTY

    "Sometimes the bravest thing is not fighting the dark. Sometimes it's just walking toward the light in someone else's room."MYRAThe nightmare was the same one.It was always the same one, or close enough to the same one that the differences didn't matter. The details shifted sometimes — the room changed, the lighting changed, the specific words were different — but the feeling was identical every time. That particular helpless quality, the sensation of being very small in a space that had decided to close around you, and no matter which direction you moved the walls were already there.I woke up at two forty seven in the morning with my heart going too fast and my hands clenched so hard that the palms ached.I lay there for a moment doing the thing I always did after nightmares — orienting myself. Ceiling. Window. The weight of the covers. The familiar smell of the room. Real things, present things, the inventory of right now rather than whatever my sleeping brain had been building.

  • CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND)   CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

    "The most dangerous place a person can live is inside someone else's mind. Because no one can follow them there to get them out."ZYRANHe was home.I'd known he would be. Nikolai's surveillance had established his patterns with the kind of precision that came from ten days of careful, patient observation, and Tuesday evenings Jeremy Torrence spent at his apartment. Alone. Consistent as clockwork, which was the particular irony of men who believed themselves untouchable — they stopped varying their routines because they'd stopped believing their routines needed protecting.The building was exactly as described. Midtown, mid-range, the kind of place that suggested comfortable rather than wealthy. A single camera at the entrance that I walked past without concern because I'd had Marcus loop the feed twenty minutes ago. A doorman who was currently on a break that would last exactly as long as I needed it to.I took the stairs.Fourth floor. Apartment 4C. I stood outside the door for a mo

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