All Chapters of Scarred Hearts: A Mafia Billionaire Romance : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

There was the roasting pheasant and a wine smell in the hall. The chandeliers spun above, a spin of gold light to velvet drapes and burnished tables of oak. Blackwoods had congregated as they so frequently did—too much, to show, to nourish drama at its best. Leya clung back from borders, an apron wrapped tightly around her pregnant belly, hair slicked smooth back to hide its tangle. She carried trays from the kitchen, silver flashing on her shivering hands. She crept every step carefully, silently, invisibly. She went unseen—it was survival. And never being permitted to see the light did not preclude the violence. "Slower," snarled Eleanor behind the chair, while Leya circumvented the chair. "In good faith, you resemble a donkey with sacks of grain bound on your back, not a servant in a decent home." There was an outburst of laughter that circulated around the table, and Vivian's cold winter's laughter blended with the others' deeper ones. Leya did not look up but only kept go

Leya was already in revolt after a crystalline silence that it suspended in stillness, stretched taut on the edge of bursting. Chandeliers dripped soft susurration of gold light, the smallest sound of crackle of fire in the fireplace to be heard inside the room, and every glance down the corridor to her—some shocked, some appalled, and one pair insensible. She stuttered out the word. A sweet, tart laugh, as if she were in the background with a blush-faced photograph on the envelope, from behind her lips. "Turn around and hear what she has to say," she whispered in Eleanor's ear "The maid thinks she's a heroine. She'll be ordering a throne at the head table next." Eleanor's horrible, cold, expensive laugh is brief. She sets the glass on the crystal plate, stem on plate, and advances, ice scorching for eyes. That was rich. Very rich. Her killer voice dripped from every syllable. "You—a beggar Anderson girl who begged at our door for crumbs—dare stand in this hall and speak of dignity?

Blackwood Hall's hallways went on and on into the hellish darkness. With every step she took away from the table, there echoed a ringing of sadistic laughter of the very people she'd so aggressively disobeyed. Eleanor's sneering sneer stuck to her like cigarette smoke. Vivian's acid writing seared through her pores like shard-glass-bright pieces of shattered glass. And Harrison. Silence is the worst kind of torture. Not ire, not defense, nor even shock — but that miserable rejection, as if she were below him on the dust. Her body trembled, but she remained standing on the fantastic, brilliant marble floor. Blackwood portraits surrounded her on the manor walls, their painted eyes watching down over her with disdain as if they sneered at her for imagining she'd ever belong to them. She was drawing record-sized lungfuls of air before she ever made a move toward her room. She shoved the huge door a little harder than she intended, and the boom reverberated like thunder through the quiet

The tension was so tight that the air she drew condensed into a thread. Eleanor and Vivian strode the halls like irritated cats, their heel-taps on marble shattering laughter into pieces like glass as they snapped by Leya. .But Leya no longer flinched. No longer ducked over her shoulders. Strided forward with pride, concealing the bared but unmistakable curve of her belly beneath armor. Her defiance was not a shrieking fight but of denials — an unseen war, and the Blackwood sisters accused her of that. It was on one of the hot afternoons when suffocating air filled the manor, just as there had been suppressed anger, that Samuel summoned them to the great hall. The family came back reluctantly. Eleanor stiff-bracing, forced forward chin. Vivian slouching in feigned weariness, pinched, hard eyes. Harrison, muttering nothing, turned his face, hand on the table as if gripping. And Leya — Leya shoved unceremoniously unwelcome, unsent but unwanted. Samuel strode across the room, coat

The days following Samuel's words did not go quietly, but in hushed tones.The manor itself appeared to be burdened, its walls to grudge. Servants walked with heads dropped, unwilling pace, furtive eyes which shifted in Leya's direction when they could not find the courage to meet her. The mood now altered — anticipatory, strained, with something indistinct yet more real.It was most tangible as she strolled down the corridors. Where once there had been raw mockery and outright hostility, now there was something else: half-concealed calculation. Eleanor's eyes linger half a beat. Vivian's smiles are full of her pouted flattery. Even Samuel, having spoken those unutterable words of "kindness," looks at her with eyes too heavy, too dark, as though already playing something she could not yet see.---Leya curled up in bed each evening around the soft curve of her belly. Candles set into the stone walls illuminated shadows and kept rhythm with her own mechanisms.She addressed her unborn