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Chapter 16
publish date:
2025-12-28 19:06:42
Latest chapter
The Bet That Ruined Us Chapter 198
The room held the words.Monica swallowed. The motion was small and controlled and she did not try to conceal it entirely because concealing it entirely would have required more effort than it was worth and her father would have seen the effort. She let it happen and she held everything else still.She had expected it.She had expected it not in the way that you expected things you hoped would not happen, but in the way that you expected things you had been watching approach for long enough that the arrival of them was confirmation rather than surprise. She had expected it because she understood her father's logic and the logic was consistent and had always been consistent and Sasha being caught had ended Sasha's usefulness and the end of usefulness was something Don Volkov treated the same way regardless of the relationship attached to the thing that was no longer useful.She had never let herself be caught.She had arranged her entire professional existence around the single organiz
The Bet That Ruined Us Chapter 197
[DON VOLKOV'S ESTATE MOB- STUDY, SAME NIGHT] Nobody moved. The three of them stood in front of the desk with the weight of his words sitting in the room and Don Volkov looked at them with the same quality of attention he had given them when he first stepped through the wall panel, thorough and entirely without urgency, the attention of a man who had never once needed to rush anything because the architecture of his patience was so complete that time itself had learned to wait on him. He walked to his chair. He pulled it out and sat down and placed both hands flat on the desk surface and looked at the documents in front of him for a moment before he looked up at them again. The cat on the corner of the desk had not moved since they entered the room. It sat with its yellow eyes half open and its tail wrapped around its own feet and it watched the room with the same quality of indifference it had shown since the beginning. "Twenty-four hours," Don Volkov said again. His lips barely
The Bet That Ruined Us Chapter 196
The air changed on the other side.Different temperature. Different pressure. The particular quality of space that had been sealed and climate-controlled, the kind of environment maintained for equipment and documents rather than for human comfort. A short corridor, no windows, running lights along the floor rather than overhead, leading toward a staircase at the far end that went up.They went up.At the top of the stairs was another door and through that door was the outside, or what counted for outside here, a short covered driveway between buildings, and Monica stepped through it and stopped on the threshold for a moment while her eyes adjusted from the darkness of the basement to the relative brightness of the floodlights that ringed the estate grounds.She had not been here before.She had known it existed. Had known the general location and the general nature of the operation that was run out of it. But she had never stood on this driveway and looked at it and the size of it to
The Bet That Ruined Us Chapter 195
[XXX LOCATION - BASEMENT, SAME NIGHT]The basement had no windows.Whatever the building above it was used for during the day, whoever moved through its upper floors and did ordinary things in ordinary light, none of that reached down here. The space was its own world entirely, sealed off from the city outside by concrete walls that were thick enough to absorb sound and dark enough that the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling created more shadow than illumination.The woman sitting in the center of the room had positioned her chair to face the entrance. She had done this deliberately. She had arrived first, as she always arrived first to things that mattered. Waiting with the patience of someone who had learned that patience was not the absence of urgency but the management of it.Her right hand was wrapped in clean white bandages from the base of her palm to just below her knuckles. Her left leg from the knee down was wrapped the same way, the bandages visible below the hem of
The Bet That Ruined Us Chapter 194
[CITY GENERAL HOSPITAL - ANGEL'S WARD, 8:45 PM] Grayson had been sitting in the corridor outside Angel's room for two hours. The doctor had come by at six. He had looked at Angel's charts, checked her responses. Had come out of the room and told Grayson that everything was as it should be, that her body was doing what it needed to do, that there was no cause for alarm. Grayson had asked when she would wake up. The doctor had said soon. Just like earlier this morning. He had waited and waited. She had not woken up. He looked at his phone. A message from Shayla from three hours ago telling him she would not make it back to the hospital this afternoon, that she was sorry, that she would explain when he got home. He had read it and set the phone down and gone back to looking at the door. Now it was almost nine at night and Angel was still unconscious and Ayven was still in a coma. Grayson stood there for a moment looking at Angel's door and then he looked down the corridor in the
The Bet That Ruined Us Chapter 193
[CITY GENERAL HOSPITAL - GRAYSON'S ROOM, AFTER] Grayson had his laptop open on the small table and his phone beside it and the particular focused expression of a man who had made the decision that functioning was the only thing available to him and had committed to it completely. He was already reading something on the screen when she came back into the room after using the bathroom and he glanced up briefly. "Go home," he said. "Shower and eat something real and rest for a few hours." "I will come back this afternoon," she said. He looked back at the screen. "You don't have to." "I am aware of that." She picked up her bag from the floor beside the couch. "I will come back this afternoon." He was quiet for a moment. Something shifted in his face that she caught from across the room, something brief and internal that he managed back into stillness before it became anything she could name. He did not look up from the screen again. "Luke is downstairs," he said. --- Luke drove t
The Bet That Ruined Us CHAPTER NINETY
Grayson's hands tightened on the tablet, his knuckles going white as the blood drained from them. The screen seemed to burn into his retinas, that thumbnail image searing itself into his brain where he knew it would haunt him forever.Shayla. His Ayla. With another man.For a moment, he could not b
Last Updated : 2026-03-27The Bet That Ruined Us CHAPTER EIGHTY EIGHT
[GRAYSON CROSS MANSION - LIVING ROOM]The drive home from the hotel had been silent. Painfully silent. Shayla had sat in the back of the SUV with her arms crossed, staring out the window with unseeing eyes while Grayson held her hand and Ayven sat quietly on her other side, sensing that something w
Last Updated : 2026-03-27The Bet That Ruined Us CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO
[10 PM - GRAYSON CROSS MANSION, GRAYSON'S BEDROOM]Shayla lay nestled against Grayson's side, her head resting on his chest, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. His arm was wrapped securely around her waist, his thumb drawing lazy circles on her hip through the thin fabric of her night
Last Updated : 2026-03-25The Bet That Ruined Us CHAPTER SIXTY EIGHT
[7:30 PM - Grayson Cross Mansion] Ayven had just returned to his room after dinner. Shayla sat on the couch in the living room, staring at her phone with a dejected expression. Her finger hovered over Ruby's contact for the twentieth time that evening, but she could not bring herself to call again
Last Updated : 2026-03-24
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