All Chapters of Tainted Desires; Demons. Darkness. Damnation : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

The black SUV glided through the night like a shark cutting through dark waters, its headlights piercing the fog that clung to the winding roads leading away from the syndicate mansion. Castelle sat in the back seat, her body rigid against the leather upholstery, staring out at the blur of trees and shadows flashing by. Rem was beside her, his bound hands now freed but still marked with the red welts from the ropes, his face a mask of forced calm. The two mafia men in the front—hired muscle from Kane's inner circle, their faces hardened by years of loyalty and bloodshed—didn't speak. They didn't need to; the silence was thick enough to choke on, filled with the unspoken weight of exile.One of the men, a burly enforcer named Viktor with a scar running from his eyebrow to his jaw, finally broke the quiet as they turned onto a secluded lane. "Almost there. Boss picked this spot himself. Says it's got everything you need." His voice was gruff, devoid of sympathy, but there was a hint of

The office was quiet save for the slow draw of Kane’s cigarette and the ticking of the old grandfather clock. His empire was restless, his men afraid to summon his presence unless necessary. But the knock at his door this time didn’t belong to any guard. It was Kareen. She stepped in with a tray balanced gracefully in her hands—his lemonade, the way he liked it, sugar barely there and with a wedge of lime pressed into the rim of the glass. Her movements were softer than anyone else’s in the mansion; even Lucien treated Kane like a commander, but Kareen slipped into his presence like water filling a vessel. She placed the tray on his desk, but before she could step away, Kane’s voice cut through the air: "Is it not strange… that I share nothing in common with the woman who birthed me… but everything in common with you?"Kareen froze. For a moment she thought he was jesting—Kane’s dry humor could sometimes slip into his voice unexpected. She laughed quietly, brushing it aside, b

The mansion never truly slept. Even in the silence of midnight, it breathed with its own rhythm—guards shifting at their posts, corridors whispering with footsteps, the quiet creak of an empire that stretched its arms across the city and beyond. But in Kane’s office, the air was still, suffocating in its weight. Kane sat at his heavy oak desk, cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, the only light streaming from the lamp that pooled in golden circles over paperwork he hadn’t touched in hours. He leaned back in his leather chair, one arm draped on the rest, the other holding a glass of bourbon untouched for too long. The liquor glowed dark amber under the lamplight, but he hadn’t sipped it. He wasn’t drinking tonight. He wasn’t sleeping either. He was thinking. And always, always, it came back to the same ghost. Castelle. The name alone was a body blow beneath his ribs, every syllable a dagger he couldn’t pull out. He had cut her from his world, severed ties with a hand that cou

The mansion had grown into a labyrinth of unease. Corridors whispered like graveyards, the servants moved with hushed feet, and men who once laughed freely at the bar now spoke in clipped tones while throwing looks over their shoulders. Kane’s fever left more than his body weakened—it left the household on edge, as though the foundations of Abyss itself were cracking in slow silence. Vincent stood apart from it all. He always did. Tall, silver streak cutting through his dark hair, his tailored charcoal suit unruffled even as the world bent and threatened to break, Vincent Salvatore leaned against the banister of the second-floor hall and studied. Always studied. Tonight, his study lingered on the quiet—on the pair who never said what their bodies always seemed to whisper. Kane lay in his room, sedated with a measured dose of morphine, bandaged at the side where the infection still raged. And Kareen had not left him. Not once. Vincent watched her slip in again, silent as she

Vincent Salvatore sat in his study long after midnight, the glow of a single lamp spilling across papers and glasses of untouched bourbon. The silence of Abyss Mansion was deceptive—it wasn’t stillness but restraint, a predatory stillness, the hush before a strike. But Vincent’s mind, though sharpened by decades of survival, was not troubled tonight by syndicate numbers or farm routes. It was haunted by shadows from the past. Kane—his son, though the man himself did not yet know the truth—was still bedridden. Infection raged, and though the fever waned under Kareen’s relentless tending, Vincent saw the weight in the boy’s eyes, the storm circling his silence. Kane always paced the halls like a lion with iron in his bones—but tonight, and for weeks, he had not roared. Vincent’s mind clawed at older memories. Not from last week, not this year, not even ten years back. It clawed to the cradle. To the hushed screams of a mother sworn to silence. To Kareen. And the child she was