Chapter 49: the call that change everything

The house was too quiet.Too hollow. Too heavy. Too wrong.I sat in the living room with the curtains drawn tight, staring at the faint outline of my own reflection in the glass. My own eyes looked back at me—empty, rimmed red, haunted. My hands twisted together in my lap, restless, fingers tightening and loosening until my nails bit deep into my skin. Tiny half-moon indents dotted my palms, a physical reminder of how tightly I was holding myself together. Every tick of the clock above the mantel landed like a hammer against my ribs, louder and heavier with each passing second.Kent’s laughter should have been echoing through these walls. His messy toys should have been scattered across the rug, the trail of his little adventures leading into every corner. Instead, the room was pristine, lifeless. Too still. The silence pressed down on me like a tomb, suffocating, swallowing me whole.Liam had tried to make me eat dinner. I couldn’t. The food had turned to ash on my tongue. He’d tried

Last Updated : 2025-10-03

Chapter 50:the pact

I insisted on meeting Mr. Abbas somewhere neutral. My house felt too exposed, too fragile — like one more secret waiting to be cracked open. His home, on the other hand, was drenched in shadows I had no intention of walking through again. So we settled on a quiet hotel lounge on the outskirts of Chicago’s business district — discreet enough for powerful men to trade lies behind smiles, and far enough from downtown that familiar eyes wouldn’t linger.The drive there was suffocatingly silent. Liam sat in the passenger seat beside me, his jaw locked tight, knuckles bone-white around his phone. Every few minutes, he’d glance my way — not saying anything, but the question hung heavy in the air between us: Are you sure about this?I didn’t answer. I just tightened my grip on the steering wheel, feeling it tremble faintly beneath my palms. It had been years since I’d driven myself anywhere — years since I’d trusted my own hands to take me where I needed to go. But today, I needed the control

Last Updated : 2025-10-04

Chapter51: fault lines

The drive home was suffocatingly silent.Chicago’s night pressed against the tinted windows, the city lights flickering like broken stars across the glass. I barely saw any of it. My reflection stared back at me — pale, hollow, unrecognizable — while my hands gripped the leather seat so tightly that my knuckles turned bone white.Beside me, Liam sat rigid in the driver’s seat. His jaw was locked, his eyes fixed on the road ahead as if sheer focus could keep the car from detonating with all the words he wasn’t saying. The hum of the engine filled the space between us — low, steady, mocking.Outside, the city blurred into streaks of steel and glass, neon bleeding across wet pavement. But all I could see — all my mind could conjure — was Kent. His small body limp in the arms of a masked man. The lifeless tilt of his head. The flash of a van door slamming shut.A sound escaped me before I could stop it — half breath, half sob. Liam’s grip on the steering wheel tightened, but he didn’t loo

Last Updated : 2025-10-05

Chapter 51 Ashes of trust

The night stretched endless, a heavy, unbroken stretch of darkness that refused to let me breathe.Sleep had been a cruel stranger. I’d drifted in and out of shallow, jagged dozes, each one ending in a start, my heart pounding at sounds that weren’t there—Kent’s laugh, Kent’s cry, Kent calling for me from somewhere I couldn’t reach. By the time the first faint threads of dawn leaked through the curtains, I felt brittle, scraped hollow. My body was a knot of tension; my throat burned as though I’d been swallowing stones all night.The staircase creaked beneath my weight as I descended, each step heavier than the last, dragging me down as if the house itself was trying to keep me from moving.The smell of coffee reached me before anything else—rich, dark, bitter. Normally it was a comfort, a small anchor in the chaos of my mornings. Today it only made my stomach twist.Liam was already there.He stood at the counter with his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his tie loosened, moving wi

Last Updated : 2025-10-09

Chapter 53 A mother’s breath

The text came without warning — a cold, small thing that landed like a stone in the dark. There was no buzzing serenade, no clumsy ring to warn me; just a vibration that rattled the nightstand like a pulse from the devil himself. My hand moved before my brain caught up, fumbling for the phone, nails scraping the wood as the screen flared and carved a thin, cruel light across the room.The message was surgical in its brevity.“Midnight. South edge of the city. Come alone. Bring no one else or the boy dies.”Too simple. Too certain. Those words carried the kind of calm only monsters wear — the composed cruelty of someone who believes obedience is a given. The sentence sat in my palm like a hot coal. I could feel its heat searing the inside of me.“Ma’am.” Liam’s voice from the doorway was tight, every syllable measured to keep him from breaking. He hadn’t slept either. The tie hung loose around his neck, his hair a tumble of exhaustion; the man looked like he’d been circling the house a