All Chapters of Bound by Deception : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Dakota stood at the small iron gate outside the house a while after Richard’s car disappeared into street, the sound of tires on asphalt still echoing faintly in her ears. For a few seconds, she didn’t move. The world felt muted, like someone had turned the volume down on everything around her. The cicadas, the distant chatter from a neighbor’s compound, even the hum of electricity in the air. It was just her and the hollow ache in her chest that hadn’t known rest since her father stepped out of her life again… this time with words that cut deeper than any knife ever could. Her chest rose and fell unevenly as she finally turned back toward the house. Each step felt heavier than the last, like she was walking against an invisible tide. She could still hear Richard’s voice in her mind, soft and pleading in the way she hated most, warning her again about Helen, like it was news to her, like she hadn’t been living under that woman’s shadow her entire life. The very idea of it made s

Consciousness returned to Dakota like a slow, unwanted tide. At first it was only darkness. Thick, endless, a suffocating black that refused to lift no matter how hard she tried to claw her way out. Then came sound. A distant dripping somewhere, rhythmic and hollow. The low hum of electricity. The faint echo of her own breathing, shallow and uneven, like it didn’t quite belong to her.Her eyelids felt impossibly heavy, glued together by something unseen. When she finally forced them open, the light that greeted her was not light at all but a dim, dirty glow that flickered overhead. The bulb buzzed like it was sick. The room swam in and out of focus. Her head throbbed. Hard. A sharp, burning sensation cut through the fog when she tried to move her hands, and that was when panic truly set in. She tugged at her arms. They didn’t budge. Her wrists were tied tightly to the arms of a wooden chair, rope digging into her skin like it was trying to carve itself into her flesh. He

Dakota didn’t know how long she had been sitting in the same position before the pain started to blur into something dull and constant. Her body felt like it no longer belonged to her, like it was an object she had been abandoned inside, forced to endure everything it went through while her mind drifted somewhere else just to survive it. Her arms were stretched behind her, tied too tightly against the back of the chair. The rope had stopped burning ages ago. Now it just throbbed, a deep, pulsing ache that settled into her bones and refused to leave. Her fingers were numb, not completely, but enough that she barely trusted herself to move them. Sometimes she tried anyway, just to make sure they were still there. The slightest movement sent tiny knives shooting up her arms. Her legs were cramped, her back stiff, her shoulders screaming. Her neck ached from the angle she’d been forced to hold it. She couldn’t shift without the ropes biting harder into her skin, and the friction had

Helen had always believed that power came with a certain kind of vision. A clarity. A way of seeing three steps ahead of everyone else in the room. But as her car left the smooth, lit streets of the city and began crawling through increasingly narrow, battered roads, she realized something uneasy settling into her bones. This place was not part of her world. And anything that existed outside her world made her uncomfortable. She leaned back against the leather seat and folded her arms across her chest, jaw tight as the city lights gradually thinned into long stretches of darkness broken only by the faint yellow blink of roadside lamps. The air felt different here. Heavier. As though the further they went, the more the world changed into something unrecognizable. Uncontrolled. She glanced at Diana, seated beside her. Her daughter looked withdrawn, arms wrapped around herself like she was bracing against an invisible storm. Her face was bare, stripped of makeup, and under the

Dawn cracked open slowly, reluctantly, like the city itself didn’t want to wake up to the kind of evil that had been done in its belly overnight. Elias stood outside the abandoned warehouse with the engine of his car still running behind him, the low purr vibrating through his bones. The sky was a tired shade of blue-grey, heavy with leftover night, the sun barely brave enough to begin its climb. His men fanned out around the perimeter in practiced silence, boots crunching softly against gravel and broken glass, guns drawn low but ready, eyes sharp with expectation. The building loomed ahead of him like a rotting corpse that refused to stay buried. Rust gnawed at the metal walls, red and brown streaks like dried blood across its skin. Windows were shattered or boarded up, dark mouths staring back at him. One side of the roof sagged inward as if exhausted by its own weight. Weeds pushed through cracks in the concrete, stubborn green life thriving in a place that clearly existed to