All Chapters of The CEO’s Temptation : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

*************************POV: Mack****************************** --- We found her sitting on the bed, her eyes too calm. That scared me more than anything else. She wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t even breathing fast. She just stared down at the bracelet in her palm like it was some strange artifact she didn’t recognize anymore. “I woke up,” she whispered, “and it was on the floor.” I moved first. Crossed the room and took the bracelet from her hand gently. “Did you get up during the night?” Rowe asked, voice low, steady. “No,” she said. “I was asleep the whole time. I swear.” “No window breach,” Liz muttered, scanning the glass from the inside. “No signs of force.” “Nothing on the motion sensors either,” Rowe added grimly. I looked at the bracelet again. The lock was intact. Untouched. He’d been here. Inside this room. While she slept. Close enough to take her. And he hadn’t. Because this was a message. And Claire wasn’t the only one w

****************************POV: Liam**************************** --- Pain wasn’t a stranger—I’d known it before. But this… this was something else. This pain didn’t just hurt—it hollowed. It reached places I didn’t know could ache. Not from the bullet wound in my shoulder or the blood soaking through my shirt as the SUV barreled down the gravel path. Not even from the metal digging into my side as Marlo tried to stop the bleeding without killing me in the process. This pain lived deeper. It nested behind my ribs, curled into the silence Claire had left behind. She had the syringe. She had the key. And I had nothing but blood and fury. “Faster,” I rasped. My voice came out low, cracked. The driver didn’t argue. The engine growled louder as we tore through the trees. Marlo didn’t say much either. He was focused on the wound, on keeping me alive. Which was funny, considering I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to be. --- “You’re lucky it passed clean,” he said a

*****************************Henry’s POV************************ --- I used to believe time was a kind of mercy. That if I just held on long enough, the pain would lose its sharpness. That the weight I carried would somehow feel lighter with each passing year. I thought age would bring distance—that the memories would fade, that the wounds would scab over and stop aching every time I breathed too deep. I told myself healing was inevitable, that one day I’d wake up, and the hurt would feel like it belonged to someone else. But it didn’t. Time didn’t ease anything. It just taught me how to hide it better. How to smile through the ache. How to live around the emptiness instead of in it. And that… that was the cruelest part of all. But tonight, peace feels like a lie. I sat in my private study, the fire crackling low, casting long shadows across the walls. I held a picture in my hand—Liam at ten, wearing a paper crown and chocolate smeared across his cheeks. His mother laug

***************************POV: Rowe*************************** The storm hadn’t even cleared before we were moving again. Rain drops still drummed on the rooftop like the ticking of a war drum, fast and relentless. But inside the estate, everything was different, louder. Barked orders. The clatter of weapons being loaded. The panic buzzed under everyone’s skin like an electric wire. Especially Claire. “Double coverage at the northeast fence. I want drones up within five,” I barked into my comms as I rushed down the hallway toward the server room. “And somebody find out why the hell Liam’s signal jammed ours for a full sixty seconds.” I barked again. My heart jumped down to my stomach as I recalled what had happened a few hours ago. I dropped the comm. The jam. That click through our comms. That single static whisper that told me he was there and we still missed him. We were played. Again. As I inside the room to sit down. Mack slammed the door open behind me. His

*****************************POV: Rowe************************ --- There were two kinds of quiet in the world. The first kind was peace—when birds sang, the air breathed easy, and the sun rose without hesitation. The wind howling like the only thing we needed at the moment. And the second? The second kind of peace was war. The kind that settled over everything right before the shot. The air stilled. The insects stopped. Even your heartbeat dared not make noise, as if sound alone might be the trigger. That was the quiet we were living in now. And I hated it. I watched the screen on my monitor flicker—one, two, three times. Then steady. The new security systems were holding. For now. We were patched. Reinforced. Reorganized. But no matter how tight we pulled the perimeter, Liam was still out there. Thinking. Moving. He’d gone silent since Caleb. Which made this even worse. Because silence didn’t mean surrender. It meant strategy. The knock on the surveill