All Chapters of Scarred Hearts: A Mafia Billionaire Romance : Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

The home seemed more controlled without Harrison. Not in sound — but in ferocity. Secrets were pushed further back, footsteps behind her, every door squeaking open at the most inopportune moment. Blackwood Hall was never finer, but with a secret of her own, Leya felt walls closing in to ambush and mislead her. She would wake up each morning with a strained cramp in her throat. She had learned to suppress it, to splash water on her face before emerging from the cocoon of her bedchamber. A wan-faced maid would lift an eyebrow — eyebrows here were daggers. She had strolled today, fatigued, but she bullied her body into motion through all things. If Samuel ever found out, if Vivian guessed, Eleanor even winked, her rumply makeover disguise would not survive the day. She even rehearsed camouflage, Late at night, alone in the tiny room of hers, she put her hands on her belly and addressed the baby inside. The voice trembled, stuttered with terror, but grew to the bursting point with hop

Planes sliced through the clouds, engines purring like an animal. Harrison sat on the leather sofa, gazing out into the night past the oval window. City lights receded, hidden by stars and blackness. A whiskey tumbler was on his table beside him, with ice in it. He'd filled it, his trembling hands, after he'd crushed his phones, but the tumbler had never reached his lips. His chest already seared, too full of rage for alcohol to assuage. Samuel's voice. Maya's smile. They churned in his head, devouring all the unsaid. He gripped the armrest so hard his knuckles ached and said This is me now," he grumbled to himself. Not a dreamer. Not a designer. A commandeur of men with guns. A Blackwood heir. My father's son. The flavor was ash. An hour later, the plane landed on foreign ground. The runway was harshly lit, and businessmen were already waiting. Harrison descended the stairs with the air of a monarch in his homeland, eyes closed, impassive. Air itself was disparate her

The weeks in Blackwood Hall weren't separated by the far-off sound of ticking clocks down its lengthening hallways, but by the elegance of its silence. Its silence had been growing more and more suffocating to Leya since Harrison left.The first week was the worst.Every morning, the sickness overtook her before she'd even rolled out of bed. She'd bite hard on her lip because she didn't allow even a whisper, pulling blankets close around her so that no other housemaid could hear a sound. The cramping in her stomach became second nature — no pain, just the fear someone would detect something she was barely controlling herself.Expectant.Her name burned deep in her bones, seared her bosom, but was a perilous flame, a flame imparted unto dry wood.She remembered the night she'd slapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the scream, welts that had erupted on her skin as his temper had gained the upper hand over his control. That night remained in the fore of memory — though her mind was a

Leya did not sleep this evening, following the telephone call to her sisters. She lay out on her lean bed, hand on her belly, fingers gentle. She could not sleep. The laughter and her sisters' voices ebbed in her head, a great living entity, shooting through her like sunlight. But at the edge of light was an aching emptiness — an aching emptiness that missed more. Her mother. The memory of her face, her hands, her voice — for so many months. Months now since she'd heard from her in so long, since she'd received the life-giving warmth of her comfort wrapping around her. Leya's mother had been her anchor, the one who could soothe a storm with one look. And now, in this reality, this pretense, Leya needed that anchor more than ever. At breakfast, between clanking footsteps and clinking knives in Blackwood Hall corridors, Leya ran down to the tiny phone room at the back of the house. It was crowded with messengers, but they weren't listening. She shut the door, racing heart, and diale

It was always to walk the town's borders to be feet and more, more than the town. It was not ablaze like Blackwood marble scorched. It did not climb feet up to the vaulted air. Here, every step between brick facades and bony streets, every window staring at her like an eye. She tied her scarf tightly around her head, not for the cold. Shamefully shameful as it was. If some of the Hall lot happened to catch sight of her here, before she got to the back door at home there would be a scandal. But she could not help it. Months. Months had passed. Months since she'd held Dalton. Months since she'd listened to his frail voice trembling with sickness. Months since she'd spent her last little bit of pocket money she could scrape together — pinched from kitchen wages, hidden in crumpled pockets — to save him. The $50,000 she'd tossed into her hand by Samuel Blackwood was tossed back to her, stamped. Not a gift. A warning. That had purchased Dalton's life, yes, but had tied her more than eve