LOGINChapter 100: BelongsPOV: OdetteThe car door shut behind me with a heavy, final sound, rain drumming against the roof, and I turned on him the second I had enough breath back to form words."You ruined my date.""Your date was with a man who grips your chin hard enough to bruise it.""That's not the point." My voice came out shaking, too loud for the small space, adrenaline still roaring through me with nowhere left to go. "The point is you don't get to decide when I need rescuing. You don't get to drive a car through a restaurant and break a man's nose and then act like that solves anything.""It solved the part where his hand was on you.""For how long, Nikolai?" I twisted toward him, glass still caught somewhere in the folds of my dress, my pulse hammering hot and fast. "You didn't fix anything tonight. You just made my father furious, handed Julian a war he's apparently thrilled to have, and gave the entire city a headline. That's what you did."He didn't answer right away. His j
Chapter 99: Not YetPOV: OdetteI didn't see it coming. One second I was turned toward Julian, watching blood drip off his chin onto the tablecloth, and the next the floor tilted sideways as Nikolai's arm hooked around my waist and hauled me straight up over his shoulder."Nikolai..." The air punched out of me, my stomach slamming into the hard line of his shoulder, the room flipping upside down into glass and strobing light. "Put me down. Put me down.""Not yet."He was already walking, fast, glass crunching under his shoes with every stride, one hand clamped across the backs of my knees to keep me from sliding. Blood rushed to my head. My hair swung forward. I pushed up against his back with both palms, trying to get leverage enough to actually argue."People are filming this.""Let them.""You broke a man's nose. You drove a car into a restaurant. And now you're hauling me out like..." I didn't even have the word for it, too much adrenaline, too much fury, too much of something hum
Chapter 98: What He's StartedPOV: Odette"I'm not leaving without her," Nikolai said, and the words were still hanging there when he moved.He crossed the distance to our table in two strides, fast enough that Julian hadn't even registered where he was coming from, and his fist connected before anyone in that wrecked restaurant had time to scream a warning.The sound landed low in my stomach. A wet, heavy crack, the kind of sound I felt more than heard. Julian's head snapped sideways, his grip finally tearing loose from my shoulder as he staggered back into the overturned table behind him, silverware scattering loud across the marble.Blood hit the white tablecloth in a sudden bright spray, spreading fast across the fabric in an ugly, blooming stain, soaking into the weave before it even had time to pool.He went down hard, one hand flying up to his face. When he pulled it away his palm came back dark red, blood already streaming fast over his mouth and chin, dripping onto his ruined
Chapter 97: Through the GlassPOV: OdetteDessert had just landed on the table, something dusted in gold leaf neither of us meant to actually eat, when the window gave way.I heard it before I understood it. A sound too big to sort into anything that made sense, glass tearing apart all at once, the whole room flooding white, chandeliers above us swinging hard on their chains, light scattering wild across the ceiling.Someone screamed. Then everyone did, a wall of noise closing in while I sat frozen, caught in that half-second gap between hearing something terrible and actually knowing what it meant.A car had come through the front of the restaurant. Black, crumpled, smoke already curling up from under a hood crushed flat against an overturned table. The tires kept spinning against nothing, a useless, grinding sound under everything else. Plaster drifted down slow from a crack in the ceiling, pale against the gold light, settling soft on the shoulders of a man still frozen mid-bite tw
Chapter 96: He Doesn't Call AheadPOV: NikolaiCai had gone to bed an hour ago, and I'd stayed in the study afterward, telling myself I had a contract to finish reading, the pages sitting open in front of me without a single word of it registering.My phone buzzed around ten, one of my security men forwarding a link without comment, the way they did when something needed my eyes faster than a summary could manage.I opened it and the whole room went very quiet around me.Three photographs. Odette at a table, candlelight catching her face, Julian Thorne's hand wrapped around hers like something he'd already paid for. The caption underneath gushing about fate and second chances, some reporter's breathless invention sitting beside a photo of a woman I'd watched flinch at the memory of a man's fingers around her wrist two weeks ago.I zoomed in without meaning to.Her smile didn't reach her eyes. I knew that smile. I'd watched her use a version of it on Clara in a hallway weeks ago, perfo
Chapter 95: Where He's HeadedPOV: ClaraThe photos hit my feed around nine, three of them pushed to the top of every gossip account I followed, and I propped my phone against my pillow and scrolled through them with something close to satisfaction curling warm in my chest.Odette Sinclair, smiling at some glittering restaurant table, Julian Thorne's hand wrapped around hers, the caption underneath already gushing about fate and second chances. I zoomed in on her face without meaning to, studying it the way I used to study my own in a mirror before a party, checking for the cracks underneath the makeup.There were cracks. I could see them even through a stranger's phone camera, something hollow sitting behind her eyes that no amount of good lighting could fully disguise.Good, I thought, and meant it, the word landing sharp and clean in my chest. Let her feel it. Let her finally understand what it's like.I screenshotted one of the photos and sent it to a friend with three laughing em







