All Chapters of Addicted: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Isabella's POV"Why so formal?" Manny smirked, leaning against the door frame. "Relax. I'm not your boss."Despite everything, I found myself smiling. "What do you want, Manny?"He rolled his eyes. "Are you going to let me in first? It's bad manners to keep a guest standing in a doorway.""Fine." I stepped aside. "Come in."He walked past me into the room, looking around with easy curiosity, taking everything in the way people do when they're trying to seem casual but are actually paying close attention."Lovely room," he said, turning slowly. "I imagine the Draco designed it personally. For his marked woman."The smile dropped off my face.Manny caught my expression and laughed. "Relax, Isabella. It was a joke. You really need to learn how to take one.""I have a lot of work to finish," I said flatly, turning back to my desk and pulling up my files. "So if you are just here to tease me, now is not the time."He didn't leave. I could feel him watching me, that particular kind of steady

Isabella's POVThe air left my lungs. Xander stood in the ring.He was stripped down, his shirt gone, the overhead light cutting sharp shadows across the lines of his body. Across from him stood his opponent, a man built like something that had been assembled specifically to cause damage. Wide, heavy, with the kind of stillness before a fight that meant he had done this many times before and enjoyed every one of them.I grabbed Manny's arm without thinking. "Tell me I am imagining that.""That's the Draco, alright," Manny said, with the casual ease of someone watching a familiar program come on television.I turned to stare at him. "Did you know? Did you know he was going to be here tonight?""I knew Xander used to fight in these things," he said, watching the ring. "I thought he'd stopped. I didn't know he'd be here tonight." He glanced over at me. "Don't let the size difference fool you. Xander has always been a different animal in the ring."I turned back and tried to believe that.

Isabella's POVThree days. That was how long I had been hiding in my room since the night I kissed Manny. And in case I needed a reminder, it had been entirely my own doing, my own mistake, my own disaster to sit with afterwards.I always seem to do this. I complicate my life, then retreat into the dark like I can undo everything by disappearing from it.I wasn't proud of it. I had replayed it more times than I cared to admit, each time arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion that I had used a kind person to fill a gap that wasn't his to fill, and then left him standing in a hallway with no explanation. So I did what I did best when a situation felt too tangled to face directly. I stayed in my room and hoped the universe would quietly sort itself out without my involvement.Mary came every day, as she always did, bringing food and quiet company and, mercifully, no interrogation. Maybe she had accepted that I processed things on a timeline of my own. Maybe she was simply tired of

Xander's POVI hadn't seen Bella since she walked out of my office with those files and that composed expression she wore when she was working very hard not to show me anything.We lived under the same roof and moved through it like strangers, orbiting each other at a careful distance, crossing paths only by accident and saying nothing meaningful when we did. I told myself this was what she wanted. She had said as much, more than once, in more than one way. She had looked me in the eyes and told me it was a mistake, and I had respected that even when every instinct I had was pulling in the opposite direction.So I didn't go to her room, even on the nights when I wanted to. I didn't seek her out. I let her keep her distance, and I kept mine, and I channelled everything I couldn't say into the one thing that had always been reliable: work.Today, at least, work had given me something concrete to focus on. Xavier was coming back.I was up early, showered and dressed before most of the hou

Xander's POVDays had passed since the conversation with my father, and his words had taken up permanent residence in my mind the way certain things do when they find the right wound to settle into.They were there when I worked. There when I tried to sleep. There in that particular quiet between waking and dreaming when the mind has no defences left. I couldn't shake them no matter what I reached for.Love is not for people like us.I had been turning the words over ever since, examining them from every angle, trying to find the place where they stopped being true. Some days I almost managed it. Most days I didn't.I thought about my mother, about the way my father's voice had changed when he spoke about her, stripped of all the control and the authority, just a man describing an absence that had never healed. I had grown up in the shadow of that loss without fully understanding its dimensions, and hearing him lay it out plainly had done something to me that I was still working throug