MasukMichael’s POV
“Micheal, I am back!” I heard a weak voice from the phone as I answered the call upon the sudden buzzing of my phone. I flinched immediately. I didn't even recognize who the person was. I remained silent for a few seconds before I could utter any word. “Please…..who am…I talking with?” I nervously stammered, asked the person. Uncertainty seeping into every syllable. I heard a feminine voice, tinged with emotions of being tortured. “It's me, Evie. I am back!” She declared, her voice steady. “You need to thank God for me that I escaped the kidnapping. Besides, I am sorry for leaving you alone in the first place. I wholeheartedly regret it.” I leaned backwards to rest my back on the chair, resting my hand on my desk beside the computer in my office. I was stunned that I could come across Evie who suddenly disappeared one fateful day. I smirked scornfully, parted my lips as I held tight my phone to my ear. “Evie, so you can come to me and apologize. So evil of you.” I finally rebuked her. I don't understand how these people will just run away and come back with a fake cry. My heart became cold and anger bubbled up inside me. “Evie,” I screamed at her, voice laced with disdain. “You're very evil and a traitor. There is nothing between us again, you bloody liar.” “Please, Micheal,” She begged me. I could hear her voice shaking with sorrow, but I wasn't pleased with it. I can't be bribed with a fake remorse. “I really love you very much but I think you're not a better man until I encounter a worse one. I'm sorry. I have learnt my lesson” I stood up from my chair, took a few steps away, toward the window and cast my gaze to the city's busy landscape. “How can I accept a cheating woman back to me, to be my wife?” I asked her, though not expecting an answer. I paused for her to grasp my message and continue, “You've shown your true behavior. Accepting you back is a red flag because I am sure you'll still leave after you find a better man than me.” I said, shaking my head to emphasize my rejection. “I will not leave.” She answered firmly, voice sounded sharp. “I have changed, Micheal. I have learnt my lessons. I have gone through a lot. I love you.” Her words etched a dimension of truth in my heart. Right from her tone, voice and her emotions, it is very obvious that she had clearly gone through some difficult times especially from unfaithful men. A sudden wave of affection surged through me. My love for her when we just started dating came back. I started to pity her. I used to remember when I used to caress her hair, wrap her in my arms as we sang love songs. The past memories of us having lunch in an expensive restaurant, exchanging playful jokes, and nice ideas to each other. The image of her smile came to my memories, then a smile curved my lips into a round hole. I finally broke the silence that went between us. “When are you coming home?” I asked, my voice softer than never before. “Very soon, sweetheart.” She quickly replied. There is a wave of joy in the voice, clearly loud enough. “Micheal, l love you. I am sorry, I had messed up before.” She eventually started to cry, though it is that of joy. “I love you.” I replied confidentially. I heard her moaning out an exciting cry. I smiled slightly to convey my joy regarding the recent bonding. “Awnnn!” She moaned for a short time, her voice sounded like the growling of an animal. “Thank you, darling. I…..missed you so much and I can't wait to see you. I'm coming this weekend.” I chuckled slightly, “Alright, I'm eager to see your beautiful face, babe.” A wave of joy bloomed on my face as I slowly lowered the phone from my ear after she ended the call. A woman whom I love most has truly arrived. I walked back to my desk and lazily sank into my chair. I leaned forward, resting my hand on the desk. I puzzled briefly on what this truly will affect–my mind went to Anne who we had been married to for three years. Then my phone buzzed. picked the phone, intently looking at the caller as her name–Anne popped up on the screen. I looked in awe. I want to answer the call but another thought nudges me to reject it. I stared at it for a few seconds as it was ringing. My mind has shifted from her to Evie. I dropped the phone to my desk, shifting my eyes to my computer. Then, the ringing started again, this time, I frowned, and rejected it immediately. I am gradually losing my affection for her while Evie's love is stirring gradually. *********** We entered the bedroom, and I locked the door—I didn’t want Anne disturbing us. I carried her luggage inside and dropped it in the corner near the bed. Evie slid one hand around my waist, the other tracing slowly across my chest. “I love you, darling,” she whispered, her voice soft and sweet—like a Sunday hymn. She stared at my lips and she wrapped her hand around my neck. I initiated the kiss before she could even ask for it. I savoured the sweetness of her mouth and she growled, making a heat course inside my trouser. The kiss lingered for minutes before we finally pulled apart, breathless. My body trembled, heat surging through me, and from the look on her face, she felt it too. She crashed her lips into mine again as her hands roamed through my body. I moved away from her body, pulling off my shirt and revealing the built abs. She began to allow her hands roamed freely around them, appreciating how mightily it had been made. She stopped abruptly, allowing her hand to go to her dress, unzipping the fabrics and allowing it to fall to the ground. My eyes flicked to her chest, and a rush of heat shot through me. I couldn’t look away. Then, as if reading my thoughts, she took my hand and guided it slowly to her breasts. The moment my fingers touched her, a wave of thrill surged through me—my cheeks flushed with the intoxicating delight of a forbidden dream coming true. I sucked the nipples, a moan forced out of her parted lips before I pushed her on the cozy bed. She spread her leg and my eyes widened at her pussy, staring at how hungry I am to take in at that moment. “Baby” I screamed, lowering my head to her thighs. “You're wet already.” I added as I began to kiss her pussy before allowing my tongue to roam freely around it. Her moaning increased as I dive deeper, allowing a sudden rush of pleasure from my body. I stood up to my feet and unhooked my belt. I moved out my cock, she smiled with delight, her mouth wide open at the big size, stretching her hand to touch and play with it. I allowed her. She glanced at my face as she stroked it, making me groan. I closed my eyes to enjoy the pleasure the stroking is giving me, what began as a slow motion grew faster as I noticed she took it to her mouth. The rush of pleasure was dizzying. My fingers tangled in her hair, gripping tighter with every wave of desire that hit me. She released my cock as she laid on the bed, spreading her leg apart, allowing me to gain access to her pussy. I entered and started pounding her faster and later violently. The feeling was interesting and I realised how much I cherish it. In the midst of it all, a sudden creak of the door snapped me back to reality. My head whipped toward the sound. The door inched open slowly—too slowly—until a hand appeared, clutching the frame. My breath caught as the intruder’s head peeked in.AFTER EVERYTHINGMaxwell's POV✦There is a particular time of evening, in the last of the summer light, when the quality of the air changes in a way that is difficult to describe to someone who has not paid attention to it. It becomes denser and more golden, and ordinary things — a table on a terrace, the sound of the city at the distance it occupies from our house, the sight of Anne moving through the kitchen visible through the open back door — acquire a quality of significance that they carry only for a moment before the light shifts and the ordinary returns. I had learned to notice those moments rather than allow them to pass unattended.My son was asleep upstairs. Four months old and already, impossibly, beginning to develop the particular expressions of a distinct person — a furrowing of the brow that I recognised, a stillness of attention when something caught his interest that I recognised from somewhere else entirely. He was himself from the beginning, which was the thing no
THE BOYAnne's POV✦He arrived in the early morning, the way important things tend to arrive — not at a convenient hour, not with advance warning sufficient to compose yourself, but at precisely the moment the universe determined was correct and not a moment before.The labour had been long. That was the honest account of it: long, and at certain points demanding more of me than I had been confident I possessed, and then ultimately delivering something that made the accounting of what it had cost seem like the wrong unit of measurement entirely. By the time he was placed in my arms, I was not composed in any professional sense of the word. I was present in a way that was entirely different from any other kind of presence I had cultivated — stripped of the layers of performance and competence and controlled surface that had served me well in every other room I had occupied, and simply there, in the basic and fundamental way of a person holding something that had changed them before th
WHAT WE BUILTMaxwell's POVThere is a particular quality to the life that follows a period of sustained intensity that I had not expected and had not been prepared for. Not emptiness — the life was full, genuinely and concretely full in ways that the period of fighting had not allowed me to fully attend to. But a difference in texture. The months of legal challenge, of strategic positioning, of constant vigilance against the movements of people who were operating against us — all of that had created a particular heightened register in which daily life had been experienced. When it ended, the ordinary world reasserted itself with a gentleness that was itself a form of startling.The company required real attention. Not the defensive attention of someone protecting a contested position, but the forward-directed attention of someone actually building something — deciding direction, evaluating structure, identifying where the operation that had been mismanaged under Greg's tenure needed
PEACEEvie's POV✦He came on a Thursday evening. I had not been expecting him — or rather, I had not been expecting him at this particular moment, though somewhere in the back of my mind I had known, across the preceding weeks of everything that had changed, that there would come a moment when this conversation happened. Greg Miller had been peripheral to my awareness for long enough that his presence felt familiar and his absence, of late, had felt like something waiting to be addressed.He knocked. I opened the door. He stood in the hallway with an expression I had not seen on him before — not the expression he wore in professional settings, which was controlled and slightly guarded, nor the expression he occasionally allowed in more private moments, which had always contained an edge I had never been entirely comfortable with. This expression was different. It was open in a way that suggested he had made a decision before arriving and had arrived with that decision fully committed
THE END OF MICHAELMaxwell's POV✦The call came early in the morning, before the day had fully assembled itself, when the light outside was still the particular thin grey of early hours and the house was quiet in the way that houses are quiet before anyone in them has begun to make themselves known to it. I did not recognise the number. I answered because I had learned, across the preceding months, that calls at unusual hours from unknown numbers were rarely without significance.The voice on the other end was professional and carefully neutral. A notification. Michael had been found at his apartment early that morning. He had taken his own life.I held the phone for a long time after the call ended. The light outside continued to be thin and grey. The house continued to be quiet. The world did not dramatically mark the moment in the way that moments of significant news sometimes felt as though they should. It simply continued being what it had been.I set the phone down on the bedsi
STRIPPEDAnne's POV✦The inheritance was formally revoked first.I read the legal notice in the professional correspondence that moved through my networks — not because I had been seeking it, but because cases that touched the same financial structures often generated overlapping documentation, and this one had found its way to me through the ordinary motion of my professional world. The terms of Michael's inheritance had contained a conduct clause — not unusual in estates of significant size where the originating party had been concerned about the management of assets by younger beneficiaries. The conduct clause had been broad enough, and his documented involvement in the proceedings surrounding Greg's fraudulent operation clear enough, that the estate's trustees had moved to execute it.The inheritance was gone.I sat with that information in the particular way I had learned to sit with information that involved someone who had caused me significant harm — without performance of em
ADVICE Maxwell POV Mira stood up and began to pace slowly, as if the living room had become her classroom and I her student. “You know the men you read about in your books?” she asked. “Those entrepreneurs you admire?” I nodded slightly. “Rockefeller,” she said. “Do you think people clapped
AN HINT ON HUMAN ENVY.Maxwell POV I returned back home with a heaviness of heart. The imminent humiliation I narrowly escaped from, thanks to my teacher who dispersed everyone to head home. I don't know what might have become of me at that moment. I sat in the living room in the evening,my eyes
ASHES OF INHERITANCEMaxwell’s POVThe mansion no longer felt like home.It was still standing—grand, expensive, and proud—its marble floors still gleaming under the chandelier lights, its walls still decorated with priceless paintings and gold-trimmed frames, its air still carrying the scent of we
CHAPTER 79CALLOUS FAMILY Maxwell POV My lips parted, but my voice did not come immediately. I struggled to speak, because I was still trying to process the insult.“Sir…” I began carefully, “they took everything from me. They came with threats. They made me sign away documents under pressure. Th







