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Chapter 38 : Daddy's Girl

Author: MELLA
last update publish date: 2026-06-03 01:44:46

"The text on the glowing screen felt like a physical brand, burning straight through my retinas and into the deepest, darkest corners of my mind.

“Did you miss me, Daddy’s girl?”

My thumb hovered over the glass, my chest heaving in shallow, silent gasps as the transport van navigated a sharp, icy curve in the Alaskan mountains. Beside me, Marcus remained still, his eyes closed, his face lined with the exhaustion of a man who believed he had finally won a war. He thought he had pulled me from th
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  • The Stepfather's Forbidden Claim    CHAPTER 76: THE BLACK Trench

    The matte-black interceptor cut through the central Pacific like an iron blade through silk.Three days out of Jurong, the warm, emerald waters of the Sunda Strait had given way to an ink-black abyss. Here, three thousand miles east of any major shipping corridor, the ocean didn't roll; it heaved in massive, glassy swells under a low, bruised sky that seemed to crush the horizon. There were no cargo vessels, no satellite pings, no contrails dissecting the clouds. There was only the low, sub-audible whine of the twin turbine engines driving us ninety feet beneath the surface radar threshold.Inside the vessel’s darkened command deck, the atmosphere was suffocatingly close. The space was illuminated only by the pale, sickly amber glow of the long-range sonar grid and the flickering green diagnostic lines of the satellite bypass console.I stood at the central navigation table, my hands planted flat against the cold steel rim to steady myself against the pitch of the vessel. I wore dark,

  • The Stepfather's Forbidden Claim    CHAPTER 75: THE PACIFIC CONVERGENCE

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    The private elevator didn’t just climb; it pressurized. As the numbers on the digital display ticked toward sixty, my ears popped, and the air turned cold. Julian stood behind me, not touching me, yet his presence felt like a physical weight against my spine. I could smell him the expensive, sharp

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    The air in the Vane Global lobby didn't smell like oxygen. It smelled like expensive cologne, filtered ozone, and the kind of cold, clinical power that makes your lungs forget how to work.I stood at the threshold of the revolving glass doors, my fingers digging into the leather strap of the design

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    The air in Julian’s office was filtered, chilled, and smelled faintly of ozone and his expensive cologne. It was a beautiful cage, but a cage nonetheless.​For three hours, I sat at the small desk in the corner, staring at the photo of my seventeen-year-old self on the monitor. Every time I tried t

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    The sun didn't rise the next morning; it just bled a pale, sickly grey through the reinforced glass of my bedroom windows.​I hadn't slept. Not for a second. I’d spent the entire night sitting upright in the middle of the oversized bed, staring at the mahogany door that connected my suite to Julian

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