تسجيل الدخول"This is my first time... it hurts... oh, it’s bleeding..." Allie winced as a cut from the kitchen knife throbbed on her finger. Liam glanced at her, his face full of concern, and applied the medicine with a sharp, almost angry tone: "I’ve told you not to go near the kitchen! Just tell me what you want to eat, and I’ll make it for you!" For Allie, her 20th birthday gift was discovering her boyfriend's betrayal with her best friend in bed. Furious, she turned her back on Nick and married Liam Hart, the city’s most influential and untouchable man. From that moment, she faced endless challenges: Nick’s constant manipulations, Liam’s family scheming against her, and the toxic people in their lives. Everyone sees Liam as the perfect, doting husband—no one knows the price she pays for his love. Exhausted, Allie faced Liam one night, her voice trembling with frustration: "Liam Hart, you are a monster in disguise." Liam, looking hurt, replied with a soft grin, “You wound me, darling. How could I possibly be a monster when I’m the one who’s supposed to protect you?”
عرض المزيدShe storms back into the house.Liam is right behind her.They make it to the hallway outside the bedroom before the argument finds its voice — not loud, not theatrical, but worse: the low, compressed fury of two people who have been holding this particular grenade for two weeks and have finally run out of hands to hold it with."You had no right—""I had every right—""He's been through enough—""You don't get to tell me what my nephew has been through—"The hallway light catches the edge of Liam's jaw, the set of it, the absolute unyielding certainty of a man who has decided he's right and has built a wall around it.It makes her want to put her fist through that wall.Then footsteps.Elizabeth appears at the end of the corridor, reading the situation in half a second with those sharp, perceptive eyes of hers. She looks between them — Allie rigid with fury, Liam sealed shut &m
Adam remembers the exact moment.Not vaguely, not in the blurred way memories tend to blur at the edges when they've been sitting too long. Perfectly. In the way certain things get burned in rather than recorded — like the image was seared directly into the part of him that doesn't forget, that doesn't soften, that holds everything it finds important with both hands until they go numb.It was the third day of freshman orientation training at Ashford.He'd only been back in the country for a week. Four years abroad — London, then Singapore, then two years back in London — had done something to his internal clock that no amount of willpower could override. He was sleeping at four in the morning and awake at noon, running on two hours and something that tasted like exhaustion but hit harder.And then the August heat.Chicago in August is not interested in your problems. The training field radiated it upward from the concrete, pressin
The garden goes completely silent.Allie stares at Liam.He just told Adam that the car was her idea — which is true, technically, she did mention it — but the way he said it, the specific weight he placed behind go thank your aunt, was not about gratitude. It was a message with teeth in it, aimed at Adam, wrapped in a sentence about a car.Adam says thank you in a voice that gives nothing away.And Liam looks at him with that composed, unhurried authority and says: "I don't think I've ever heard you call her aunt. Not once. Does Allie not count as family to you, Xiao Han?"Allie's jaw tightens.She understands now — completely, crystallinely — what Liam is doing.He's using her.He's using her to draw a line around Adam. To remind him of distance, hierarchy, boundary. And the worst part — the part that makes the anger surge up from somewhere below her sternum &m
She doesn't say a word through dinner.Not one word that matters. She eats and smiles and passes dishes and laughs at the right moments — a performance so clean she almost convinces herself. But underneath it, Liam's words in the car are doing what words do when they're sharp enough: repeating. On a loop. Remember who you are. Have some sense of being a wife.He thinks something happened between her and Adam.He thinks — after everything, after all of it — that she is that person.And the worst part is not the accusation. The worst part is that she can feel it working on her — the way guilt she doesn't deserve starts to feel like guilt she does, when the person doing the accusing is someone she trusts with her whole heart.Who she trusted with her whole heart.After dinner she goes outside.Not a decision. Just — her feet take her out the back door into the garden before
Something about Vivian was… off.
Did she say something wrong again?The moment the word left her lips, Allie caught it—the subtle twitch in Adam’s brow, the slight narrowing of his eyes.A flicker of irritation, barely there, but sharp enough to slice through her confidence.Adam folded his arms across his chest, his stance as clo
Liam looked stunned for a split second.I could see it—the slight hitch in his breath, the way his gaze lingered on me just a little too long. It was rare to catch him off guard, and I had done it with one kiss. A soft one. Barely there. But enough.My cheeks burned with the aftermath. I turned my
Liam’s eyebrows twitched slightly.That was twice today.I had kissed him—completely unprovoked. And now, I couldn’t even look him in the eye.God, what was wrong with me?My cheeks were burning, the heat spreading down my neck like a wildfire. Had I been too forward? Was I misreading him entirely?


















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