No Way to Win Me Back のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 411 - チャプター 420

Celeste’s POVOfficer Raymond had said it would be brief. A check-in. A formality. His voice over the phone had been careful, the way people sounded when they were standing near something volatile and didn’t want to jostle it.So I went.Jails had a way of compressing the air, of making even breathing feel supervised. The security gates slid shut behind me with mechanical indifference, each clang echoing a reminder that this was a place built for consequences, not explanations.I signed my name, accepted a visitor badge, and waited on a hard plastic chair that looked designed to discourage reflection.That was when I saw her.Vanessa sat across the room, one leg crossed over the other, spine straight, coat immaculate. Even here, especially here, she looked curated.As if the space around her had been forced to accommodate her presence rather than the other way around. She was speaking to someone just out of my line of sight, her profile sharp, her expression controlled.Our eyes met a

Vanessa’s POVI took a deep breath.It wasn’t like me to be so nervous so I didn't know why I was feeling the way I was.If maybe things hadn’t derailed like this, I would still have the upper hand over Maximilian. But as things stood, my position was becoming more precarious by the day.I had barely stepped into Maximilian Edwards’s office when he said, without turning around, “What do you want, Vanessa?”Straight to it. No pleasantries. No theater. Typical.I closed the door carefully, because I refused to give him the satisfaction of hearing it slam. “Lovely to see you too,” I said lightly. “Andre Cox has been arrested.”Silence stretched. Intentional. He always liked letting bad news sit in the air, like a smell you couldn’t escape.“You know who he is,” I added.“I do.”“He needs to be released,” I said. “Quietly. Preferably yesterday.”That got his attention. He turned slowly, as if every movement had been rehearsed decades ago and never adjusted since. His eyes were cold, calcul

Celeste’s POVBy the time the Beaumont International representatives arrived, I had already been awake for fourteen hours and running on a fragile combination of caffeine, adrenaline, and stubborn resolve.They came in pairs, always pairs. Impeccably dressed, polished smiles, voices trained to sound collaborative while circling like sharks.Today it was a woman named Elise and a man whose name I immediately forgot because he spoke like a press release given human form.We sat in the main meeting room at Rosemary Atelier, the long table between us cluttered with contracts, tablets, and carefully arranged cups of untouched coffee.I took the seat Grace used to occupy.The absence was physical. Tangible. Grace should have been here, shoulders squared, eyes sharp, calling out subtext before I even finished a sentence.Instead, the chair beside me was empty, and the weight of that emptiness pressed into my spine.Elise smiled first. “Ms Sinclair, thank you for seeing us on such short notice

Andre’s POVJail rotted you from the inside out long before it touched your skin.It was the smell first, bleach layered over sweat, old metal, bodies that had learned to give up. Then the noise. The coughs that never stopped. The shouting that came in waves. The silence afterward that pressed too hard on your ears.I’d been counting the days since Vanessa visited. One. Two. Three.No lawyer.No call.No message passed through a guard’s bored mouth.Nothing.At first, I told myself it was a strategy. Vanessa always liked to make people wait. Keep them hungry. Keep them scared. She’d swoop in at the last moment, like she always did, and everything would be fixed.By day four, that lie tasted sour.By day five, I couldn’t swallow it anymore.Vanessa had abandoned me.The realization didn’t come with anger. It came with a cold. A hollow, sinking cold that settled in my chest and stayed there, unmoving.I lay on the thin mattress at night staring at the ceiling, listening to a man two cell

Ryan’s POVCeleste didn’t say she was shaken.That was the thing about her, she never announced the damage. She just grew quieter, sharper around the edges, like glass pulled too thin.I saw it in the way she reread emails twice. In the way her hand lingered on the edge of her desk as if grounding herself. In the way Rosemary felt… off. Not broken. Just narrowly missed.Vanessa hadn’t destroyed Rosemary.But she’d come close enough that the scorch marks were still warm.I stayed late without asking. Not hovering, Celeste hated that, but present. Coffee refreshed before it went cold. Notes compiled before she had to request them. I moved through her orbit like gravity instead of interference.She noticed. She always did.“They were inside,” she said finally, voice low, eyes fixed on the window. “If Andre hadn’t panicked. If one file hadn’t been recovered. If one camera hadn’t glitched back—”“But it didn’t,” I said gently.She exhaled, shaky. “It could have.”I didn’t argue.Because she