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Chapter forty eight:
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2026-06-22 17:46:48
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RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty two:
Leah Comes BackCadenLeah arrived at seven with two bottles of wine, enough food for approximately eleven people, and the energy of someone who had been restraining herself for a week and had decided restraint was officially over.She walked past me at the door with the ease of someone who had long since stopped treating this house as somewhere she needed permission to be, set everything on the kitchen counter, turned around, looked at me directly for the first time since she’d left, and said — “You told her you loved her.”Not a question.“Yes,” I said.“First time you’ve said that to anyone,” she said. Also not a question.“Aria told you,” I said.“Aria tells me everything,” Leah said. “That’s what I’m for.” She looked at me with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously — assessment, approval, something that might have been warmth if Leah’s warmth wasn’t always wrapped in something sharper. “Good. It was time.”She turned back to the food and started unpacking it
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty one:
SettlingAriaThe week after everything settled was the strangest week of my life.Stranger than the week it happened, honestly. Because the week it happened I was running on adrenaline and crisis and the specific tunnel vision of someone navigating disaster, which meant I didn’t have the bandwidth to feel all of it. I was just moving, just handling, just getting through.The week after, I felt all of it.Not in a bad way. Not in the collapsing, can’t-function way I’d been half bracing for. Just — fully. The way you feel things when there’s finally room for them and your nervous system has permission to process instead of manage.I cried twice on Monday for reasons I couldn’t entirely explain and then felt significantly better.I ate three proper meals on Tuesday which sounds minor and wasn’t.On Wednesday I slept until ten and woke up without checking my phone first and lay there in the quiet of Caden’s room with the morning light doing its thing and felt something that took me a min
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty:
Wabasha StreetCadenThe bank opened at nine.We were there at eight fifty-three because Aria had been awake since seven and her version of waiting patiently was arriving seven minutes early and standing on the pavement in the cold looking at the door like she could make it open faster through sustained eye contact.I stood beside her with coffee I’d brought from home in two travel cups and said nothing about the eye contact because I understood it.Twenty-two years of something was inside that building.David was on her other side, hands in his coat pockets, quieter than he’d been all week. He’d barely spoken over dinner the night before, not withdrawn, just internal, processing in the way I was learning was his version of preparing for something significant.Thomas was behind us, white haired, solid, the key already in his coat pocket where it had apparently lived for two decades.My lawyer was inside, already there, having arrived at eight forty-five because I’d asked him to and h
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty nine:
ThomasAriaI read the message four times.Each time hoping my brain would file it somewhere manageable. Each time it refused.Thomas Cole. David’s mother’s brother. Which made him David’s uncle, which made him connected to my father through marriage rather than blood, which made him someone who had existed in the orbit of everything this week without ever appearing in any file, any document, any conversation.Something Romano never found.That was the part that sat in my chest like something pointed.Romano had found everything. Files on my father, my mother, me, Caden, everyone connected to anyone connected to this family. He’d built a system of surveillance and leverage that had taken Sophia twelve years to fully map and had still produced surprises every single day this week.If Thomas Cole had something Romano never found, it either meant it didn’t exist or it was the best-kept secret this family had produced.“Show David,” Caden said quietly beside me.I looked up.He was right.
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty eight:
The Morning He Said ItAriaI woke up to his mouth on my shoulder.Not urgent. Not the kind of waking up that meant something was happening or someone needed something or the world had decided to deliver another crisis before breakfast. Just his mouth, warm and slow, pressing against my shoulder like he’d been awake for a while and had decided this was a reasonable thing to do with the time.I didn’t move.Didn’t let him know I was awake yet.Just lay there and felt it — the specific luxury of being woken up gently by someone who wanted to and had nowhere to rush to, his mouth moving from my shoulder to the curve of my neck, his arm already around my waist, his body warm against my back.“I know you’re awake,” he said against my skin.“I was enjoying the deniability,” I said.He made a sound that was half laugh, pressed his mouth to my neck one more time, and settled.We lay there in the particular golden quiet of a morning that had decided to be beautiful about it, the light coming
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter fifty seven:
First DateAriaHe took me to a restaurant that had no right being as beautiful as it was on a Tuesday night in Minnesota.Not flashy. Not the kind of place designed to impress through volume — no towering ceilings or aggressive lighting or waitstaff who recited the menu like a performance. Just warm. Low lit. The kind of place that felt like it had been there forever and intended to stay, with dark wood and candles and the particular quiet of somewhere people came to actually talk to each other.I slid into the booth across from him and looked around and then looked at him.“How long have you known about this place,” I said.“Years,” he said. “I come here when I need to think.”“Alone,” I said.“Always alone,” he said. “Until tonight.”Something warm moved through my chest.I picked up the menu.He watched me read it with that attention he gave everything — unhurried, complete, like I was the most interesting thing in the room which I knew for a fact wasn’t true because Caden Voss i
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty nine
What Was On The DriveAriaI found it by accident.Sophia had handed me the drive twenty minutes after Caden left, told me to keep it safe, and gone to make coffee in the kitchen like a woman who had just blown up her entire life and needed something warm to hold afterward. I understood that. I res
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty eight
Last RitesCadenI didn’t want to go.Let me be honest about that. I stood in the hallway with my keys in my hand and my jacket on and Aria looking at me from the study doorway with that expression she wore when she was trying not to ask me not to do something, and I didn’t want to go.Romano Voss
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty six
LiveAriaI watched Caden’s face change and felt every ounce of warmth from the last ten minutes drain straight out of the room.“Active where,” he said again, slower this time, like he needed to hear it twice to believe it.I couldn’t hear the other end of the call but I didn’t need to. I watched
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty five
By TomorrowCadenI stared at that message until the words stopped meaning anything and started again.By tomorrow, you won’t have a company left to fight for.My father, somewhere in federal custody or out of it depending on which version of the call I believed, still finding ways to reach into m
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