All Chapters of Scarred Hearts: A Mafia Billionaire Romance : Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

The park was never, anyway, quiet. Late afternoon, even, it buzzed with its own murmurs of the mothers to the kids, pigeons cooing, sitting on lookout for crumb scraps of bread, and a fountain splashing where coins are spat on the sidewalk. To Leya, though, who sat on the lap of a maple tree, the world's quietest place.Her scarf had been blown from its path by the gust, her hair flowing on her head. She didn't care. Flesh warmed, and no Blackwood telling her to stand, sit, or breathe differently.Her own hands falling naturally onto her belly. Small, barely noticeable, but to her, a whole world unfurling in her womb. Shayla's voice ringing in her mind — wheezing excitement when she'd been told. Her mother's tears fell onto her hands, holding Leya's face. Dalton, his deathly white face and hunched up in a smile, telling her of how she'd pushed him on to battle even more for his sickness.She was whole for the first time in years, all united by the tiny life within.But in the park, he

Blackwood house never slept — never. Even when chandeliers exploded into gold light and corridors released the breath of shuddering feet, the house gasped from some far-breathing lung and blew silences which lay like spiders' webs on the walls.These silences had accumulated to Leya's limits.It had been nearly two weeks since she'd first laid hands on her belly and discovered her secret was not hers. Rending in the mornings threw her out of bed with such foul sickness she was sick over the basin, clammy forehead, scrubby red clenched lips for not screaming.And yet she worked.Tumbling down the spinning, curling stairs. Firing silver until arms tremble. Ironing the party gowns in Eleanor's bedroom, gritting hard on the edge of scornful laughter. She practiced concealment of trembling hands by keeping them inside the apron, practiced muffling raw gasps for air by leaning upon the other girls'.She could not silence the whispers."Behold her," one of the servants growled in disgust as

Maya companies' headquarters were a kingdom of kingdoms. Seventy-two stories tall, glass skin sliced the sky into silvers and smokes of angles. The city pulsed beneath her — red rear-lights curving, people crawl like insects over crossings, billboards burning her name through nights. They all glowed with her face, as if the world itself couldn't go on without first passing beneath her mirror. There was quiet in her office, however. Her servants had learned to let it be. Only in outer halls, as far away as incense beyond a temple door, were grumblings heard. Maya leaned against the window, the fingers tracing listlessly the cold of the glass, drumming fingers against it with a slowness so habitual as to be unconscious. She was not gazing out over the city. She was gazing out over it. Where she couldn't look but always did. Blackwood Hall. That name was a curse even in her mind. Her head was spinning a little inside the glass — a woman of success, silk that shone like metal, diamo

Two weeks might go on quietly and silently, but leave their marks. To Leya, they weren't suffering, but suffered. Each day was a struggle — illness summoning her to the side of her tiny bed to the washstand, where she let her brow fall against its chill rim, reciting in her mind her mother's cryptic words: Strength isn't in the cry, child. It's in silence unbroken. She gave birth to a pallorless, red-faced child in the silence of prettiness. She tugged until her arms went numb, irons hot red through Eleanor's silks, burnished silver until her fingers shattered, buckets through twist stairways that curled in limp ribbons through the Hall. The whispering trailed after her wherever she went, curling up like smoke in corners: Weak. Fragile. Poisoned. She just kept repeating and repeating that she hadn't listened to them. She just kept repeating and repeating that she was above such. But at bedtime, all tucked in under the bedspread with both hands tugging downward over her belly, the

Morning crept in like a stifling breath as the sunlight slipped through the tiny maids' room window, streaming in golden and bright, stifling it as if the air had been plotting to strangle her.Her shawl fell around her ankles. Her lips she bit alone and by herself — where Harrison kneeled that afternoon and kissed her lips. A kiss so fleetingly yet so destructive that it had brought her to two: the woman she was, and the woman she knew today that she could be.She wasn't dreaming, but she was sure of that. She clung to it.Her arms dropped, embracing her belly. The baby. His. She had carried him within her, ridden out the tempests of shame, ridden out Eleanor's and Vivian's contemptuous taunts, but now she would have nothing. He was coming back. He had kissed her. He would look after her.She would tell. She would scream it.By mid-morning the Hall was in an uproar of loud dispute. Eleanor was in the chair with the velvet back, sitting like some kind of queen, Vivian on one side, wit