LOGINShare
Chapter 17: THE RIVAL BOSS
publish date:
2026-08-26 17:45:03
Latest chapter
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 72: Discovered
DarioAn hour earlier, I was standing in my sister's kitchen with a burner phone in my hand, telling myself I was a man in control of his own life.The message had come in at 11:52. No name. A number I didn't know. Six words.Boathouse. Now. See your bride.I read it four times. The first time I thought it was a joke. The second time I thought it was a trap. By the third, I knew it was both, and I still couldn't put the phone down.Here is what I'd been carrying for six months, and never said out loud to Elena or anyone else. I was in love with a woman I'd been ordered to marry. I don't mean the polite, dutiful fondness you're supposed to feel for a wife you didn't pick. I mean I had started taking the long way through the east hall so I'd pass her office door. I knew she took her coffee with too much sugar and hid it from people because it made her feel like a child. I knew she hummed when she read contracts, without a tune, without noticing, and stopped the second she caught anyone
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 71: Years in The Making
WrenThe boathouse door was never locked. I should have understood that about Kiryan years ago. He guarded everything I owned, but he never put a lock on anything of his own.I let myself in a little after midnight, with my heels hanging from two fingers. The council meeting was still crawling under my skin. Vas had spent four hours telling the board why a woman who wouldn't set a wedding date couldn't be trusted with her own signature. Four hours of grown men staring at the table while he said "for her protection" like it was a prayer. I had smiled so hard my back teeth hurt.The room above the water smelled of cedar, gun oil, and the black tea he drank when he thought nobody was counting his cups. One lamp burned by the window. Outside, the lake lay flat and dark."You should have called," Kiryan said.He stood at the workbench with his back to me, sleeves pushed up, cleaning a pistol he had already cleaned. I knew, because I'd watched him do it three nights in a row from the terrac
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 70: Understood
ElenaI have replayed that moment a thousand times since, trying to understand exactly what shifted in me while he knelt there in front of my chair with his whole terrible history laid bare between us.I could have hated him. Some small, wounded part of me wanted to wanted the clean, simple fury of blaming the man in front of me for everything I'd lost before I could even walk, wanted an easy villain instead of the messy, complicated truth actually sitting in that kitchen with us.But hatred needs simple answers that truth rarely gives.I thought about every version of my life I'd been handed a birth certificate that lied, a scar with a false story attached, a whole childhood built on the careful, well-meant silence of people who thought protecting me meant keeping me ignorant. And I thought about the one person in this house who had finally chosen honesty over protection, even knowing exactly what it might cost him, even knowing I might never look at him the same way again. There was
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 69: The Whole Truth
Kiryan"And I refused," I said, before she could pull her hands away, before the horror on her face could turn into something final. "Elena, look at me. I refused. I want you to hear that before anything else I'm about to tell you. I refused, and it nearly cost me my life, and everything that happened after that night every single thing I have done since I did because I couldn't live with what almost happened to you, and I couldn't undo it, so I spent nineteen years trying to make it right instead."She didn't pull away. Her hands stayed locked around mine, and something in her face shifted from horror toward a kind of desperate, disbelieving hope, like she needed the rest of it before she let herself feel anything at all.Once I started, I couldn't stop. Nineteen years of silence broke like a dam, and everything I'd buried came pouring out at once."I was nineteen," I said. "Picked three years earlier by men who saw a boy with nothing left to lose and decided that made him useful. By
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 68: Say It
Elena"Then say it," I told him. "All of it. Right now. I don't want fragments anymore, Kiryan. I've had fragments for a week and they've been eating me alive from the inside out. I want the whole truth or I want nothing at all."He set the coffee mug down with a hand that wasn't quite steady, and for the first time since I'd known him, I watched the calm that had defined every single thing about him crumble in real time, right in front of me, with nowhere left to hide it."If I tell you," he said, "there's no taking it back. You'll know exactly what I did and exactly what I am, and I don't know how you look at me after that. I've spent nineteen years not knowing how to live with it myself.""I already know enough to be terrified," I said. "The not-knowing is worse than whatever you're about to tell me. It has to be. Nothing could be worse than the version I've been building in my head all night.""You don't know that.""Then let me find out," I said, and my voice cracked on the last
THE SONGBIRDS CAGE Chapter 67: Putting it Together
ElenaI didn't sleep either, that night, though I let him believe I had.I lay against his chest counting his heartbeats, running the pieces he'd handed me over and over until they started arranging themselves into a shape I didn't want to look at directly.A job, almost two decades ago. A family that had become inconvenient. A little girl he'd never quite finished describing, though something in the way his voice had gone rough around the words told me he knew exactly what she looked like, exactly what colour coat she'd been wearing, exactly how frightened she'd been.March the fourteenth. A date he flinched at, a date close enough to my own birthday to explain the flinch, if my birthday was the thing haunting him.I thought about the coat with the Kozlov crest hidden in the back of his closet, the one I'd found weeks ago and assumed, foolishly, belonged to some old assignment unrelated to me. I thought about how carefully he never asked about my scar, how he traced it with something
You May Also Like
You Can Run But...
AmonAvHs257.2K viewsHis Forbidden Goddaughter
NiMarie163.9K viewsThe Mafia's Nurse
Astrid.O126.8K viewsTied to the mafia man 3 : Mia
Pravs_3618167.7K viewsFORCED MARRIAGE: The Italian Mafia's Obsession
Author Marr804 viewsThe Substitute Bride The Cartel King Refused To Let Go
Naomi_Writhes67 viewsCLAIMED BY MY MAFIA BODYGUARD
Luisa298 viewsHis Beautiful Nightmare: From Chaos to obsession.
Youneverknow 302 views
