Semua Bab Scarred Hearts: A Mafia Billionaire Romance : Bab 151 - Bab 160

The hallway was sucked dry as a suppressed breath of the Servants recoiled, stunned gasps torn into coarse whimpers as though rent asunder by shame at not having died, Eleanor and Vivian were nowhere to be seen, their laughter echoing somewhere on the distant horizon like filth bells.And Leya was left behind.She shook in her jar but the corridor was warm. Cold, cold, she stooped to pick up the archive on the marble. Ink on her wet fingers blurring, tears smudged the midwife's script so that even proof was washed away.She folded the paper into her breast and melted into the dark. Alone, her knees were bent. Her belly recoiled, no longer sick. With lies. With pain so broken that it oozed from her belly like slivers of broken glass.Harrison's words sliced through her head, one slicing more brutally than ever before.Not mine. Another's. Never mine.She reached her room in the servants’ wing and collapsed on the thin mattress, Her body curled inward, her shawl dragging over her should

Darkness adhered to the panes, silvering the glass with moon. Leya paced back and forth in the hall outside his study door, palms damp, heart pounding at her ribcage as though it would explode out. She had heard the rumors which had been whispered amongst servants all morning, felt Eleanor's icy gaze stabbing her as she passed, and heard Vivian's icy laughter ringing down corridors.But it had not mattered.What had mattered was he.Shaking hands grasped the crumpled piece of paper — evidence she had stolen from the doctor's bag and possessed for days. Evidence of truth in her womb. Evidence she bore not shame, not lies, not another man's child — but his.Harrison's.The man she'd loved since he'd pulled her from the broken bloodied ruins of her family, the man whose momentary kindness had been enough to make her think the world didn't have to be quite so broken.She swallowed hard, her throat dry tonight he'll listen. Tonight he'll look. Her hand rose in hesitation then knocked gentl

The weeks dragged out like lead weights.The servants' bell roused her from restless sleep day after day, rousing Leya with the same earnest prayer wedged in her teeth: let my child live, let my strength endure another day. But strength was being drained from her step by step, with eachinous chore Blackwoods exacted of her.Her own body trembled where she stood, her arms around enormous heaps of cut-crystal glasses. Her lower back hurt from scrubbing with her hands and knees for hours. Her bulging belly before her reminded her with each step that she no longer moved anywhere alone. And to the family, her bulging belly was not life—life was power negotiation.Fifteenth morning, Eleanor summoned her to the drawing room in the east, the drawing room glowed golden when sunlight descended across high windows of glass, and gilded surrounds emanated like light, Eleanor reclined on the velvet chaise, crossed legs neatly, while Vivian stood by the mantel, a creeping figure with hands folded, h

The house remained overnight, slicing through all clefts with blade-edged, hard bone, light above shadow. Samuel Blackwood had his study, a study redolent with the scent of old leather, cigar smoke, and the iron smell, reminding him of things forgotten. Walls lined with shelves of books, book covers remembered long ago, more trophies than books, bearing witness to a string never sagging, never broken.A single smoldering lamp on his desk, amber liquid dripping on paper and ledgers. Samuel sat back in his chair, the glass of whiskey between the tip and the ball of his thumb and index finger. He rocked it gently back and forth, not to consume it, but to watch the amber liquid trickle like flame in a container.Leya thought she lived too fast.He remembered the face — white, trembling, obstinate — because she had half-knelt-fallen on his study floor. She had crawled forward onto herself, her voice broken as she pleaded not for herself but for the child. His granddaughter had kept insisti

Blackwood Hall days now came in dribs and drabs like prison bars, one after the other, every single one of them suffocating Leya until her chest no longer had space in the room to breathe.Weeks after Harrison's night when he'd pulled her out into the public eye in the eyes of the family and embarrassed her — weeks of people whispering about her in their own company like a fog, of dropping her off everywhere, of work that sucked the soul out of her that led on as "duty."If ever she had imagined that marriage to Harrison was a key to respectability, she had no such visions now. She was not mistress here. She was a servant — scapegoat—fragile glass whose value lay only in how much she could take before shattering.And she was shattering.Increases had preceded her. She got up before the fifth bell tolled, shivering on icicled stone floors, stacking coal upon fires on which Eleanor never warmed and scrubbing stairs Vivian later remembered as "dusty." She carried trays so laden that her