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Chapter 32: I Could Not
Date de publication:
2026-04-10 23:57:04
Dernier chapitre
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 120: The Night
Adrian's POVI couldn't sleep.The thought of Ethan in a room with Leon sat somewhere behind my sternum, heavy and unmoving, like something lodged. I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know if I even had the right to do anything with it.'Is it valid,' I kept asking myself, 'to drive there? To go and bring him back?'And then the quieter, uglier question beneath that one.'What if he wants to be there?'He made a choice tonight. He left with Leon. That was a decision. Adults make decisions.I exhaled.Wait.....Maybe I'm reading into nothing. Two people who know each other, who had too much to drink. A shared room doesn't mean what my mind insists it means.'Is it?' my subconscious asks flatly.I don't answer.I'm sitting on the balcony facing the front gate, the cigar burning slow between my fingers. The smoke curls and threads into the cold air and disappears. The cold doesn't help. It passes over my skin and does nothing, sends a shiver down my spine and leaves the noise in m
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 119: Cancel the date
Adrian POVI closed the cabin door behind me.The tie came off first. I loosened it and threw it across the desk without looking where it landed. Two buttons at the collar, undone. I pressed my palm flat against the glass wall and stood there.Fuming."What the fuck", I curse under my breath.I pushed off the glass and started moving. Left to right. The length of the room and back. My fingers dragged through my hair roughly, pulling at the roots like that would somehow untangle the mess inside my head."How did I make such a mistake", I mumble to myself.I had checked my own schedule. Cleared my evening. Planned the whole thing around a window I had made deliberately, carefully. And then completely failed to account for the fact that my assistant had his own schedule. His own life. A life that apparently included dinner with Leon."How can I check my schedule but not his?", I facepalm myself.What was I even thinking. Just because my evening was free did not mean his was. I was paying
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 119: Unexpected Kiss
Ethan's POVThe confession sat in the air between us like something fragile that neither of us knew how to pick up.Leon exhaled slowly after saying it, the way people do when they have been carrying something for too long and have finally, at great cost, set it down. His shoulders dropped. The tension that had been holding his body together for the last few minutes loosened visibly.He looked relieved.I felt nothing of the sort.I was frozen in the exact position I had been in when the words left his mouth, one hand still holding the edge of his blanket, my breath caught somewhere between my chest and my throat, my mind completely and utterly blank. The kind of blank that is not peaceful. The kind that comes from the sudden absence of every coherent thought at once.I did not move.I did not speak.I simply stood there, wrestling with something I had no name for yet."I like you a lot, Ethan," he said again.Quieter this time. More certain. Like saying it twice made it more real, or
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 118: You Are Drunk, Leon
Ethan's POV By 7:45 PM the last file was closed, the last email sent, and the three of us were finally done pretending the day had not already wrung us completely dry.Leon had been waiting near the lobby with his car keys and that particular smile of his, the one that meant he had already decided how the evening was going to go and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.I did not argue.I was too tired to argue.The drive to the Lotus Resort took about twenty minutes, and nothing could have prepared me for what waited on the other side of those gates.It was the kind of place that made you forget you had spent the last ten hours staring at spreadsheets. The architecture was sweeping and deliberate, designed nine years ago by a firm whose name I vaguely remembered seeing in a magazine. Deep sea blue pools caught the last light of the evening sky and held it there like something precious. Lotus structures rose at careful intervals across the property, each one detailed so p
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 117: Having Dinner with Leon
Ethan's POVBy the time I reached the office, the warmth from my morning visit to Aunt Candia's house had settled into something quieter. The kind of calm that comes after a good visit, the kind that makes the rest of the day feel almost manageable.Almost.The floor was alive with its usual rhythm. Phones ringing, keyboards clicking, someone from the finance team rushing past me with a stack of folders pressed against their chest like they were carrying something fragile. I fell into the pace of it easily, the way you fall into a familiar song.As I passed Adrian's cabin, I glanced through the glass walls out of habit.He was having lunch with Noah.The two of them sat across from each other with Noah's tablet propped between their plates, some document pulled up on the screen. Noah looked relaxed, leaning slightly forward, gesturing with his fork, occasionally smiling at whatever point he was making. Adrian looked like Adrian. Focused. Still. Completely unreadable in the way that ha
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 116: Don't fall so hard
Chapter — Ethan POVI woke before the alarm.The room was still gray, that particular quiet that exists only in the hour before the city remembers itself. I lay still for a moment, orienting. The warmth beside me. The steady sound of his breathing.Adrian was asleep.Deeply, genuinely asleep in the way he rarely allowed himself to be. On his back, one arm loose at his side, the sharp lines of his face softened into something almost peaceful. I watched him for longer than I should have. Something in my chest did a slow, inconvenient thing that I chose not to examine.I got up carefully.Dressed quickly in the half dark, moving without sound, muscle memory handling the buttons and the buckle while my mind stayed half in the room, half already on the road. I checked myself in the mirror once. Ran a hand through my hair.Then I went back to him.I do not know what made me do it. Some pull I did not think to resist. I leaned over him and pressed my lips to his forehead, soft and brief, bar
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 92: Adrian is your boyfriend
Ethan's POVThe next day, I insisted I was fine.Nobody seemed convinced.The dark circles under my eyes were still there, and despite my efforts to act normal, my mind kept wandering back to the message. Back to the cemetery. Back to the questions that had suddenly appeared in my life without any
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 91: Shadows That Never Left
Ethan's POVThe message wouldn't stop staring back at me. My fingers tightened around the phone as my vision blurred for a moment. The words were simple, only a single sentence, yet they carried enough weight to send my entire world crashing down."Stay away from Adrian if you want to live."A viol
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 88: Caught up Between Two CEO's
Ethan's POVAdrian sat at the head of the table. Leon directly across from him. I took a seat two places down from Adrian, close enough to be involved, far enough to breathe.Marco opened the presentation while I quietly steadied myself.We had put everything into this. Late nights, revised drafts,
Contracted to the man who broke me Chapter 87: The Cold Tension
Ethan's POVDavel and I walked out of Adrian's cabin together after taking the approval of Adrian for fixing the appointment schedule with Leon's secretary and preparing the rough structure for the upcoming meeting.The moment the cabin doors closed behind us, Davel suddenly looked at me sideways w
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