Lahat ng Kabanata ng Married To The Son Of Sin : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

The elevator's chime was a death knell in the silent walls of the lancasters.My fingers froze on the laptop's edge, the metal suddenly ice-cold against my skin. Across the study, Adam stood silhouetted inches away from me, the moonlight painting silver streaks along the tense muscles of his bare torso. The fading restraint marks around his wrists looked like ghostly handprints in the pale glow. Eve's footsteps tapped a deliberate rhythm down the hallway—click, click, click—each one measured to make my pulse jump. "Lucia?" Her voice curled through the darkness like smoke. Adam's golden eyes locked onto mine, the pupils dilated from either the lingering medication or raw betrayal. "What did you do?" he whispered, the words rough as sandpaper. He was asking for the third time.Adam knew what I did.why was he asking?The bedroom door swung open before I could answer. Eve stood framed in the doorway, her ivory silk robe glowing like a specter. She took in the scene—Adam's defens

The first thing that registered was the cold. Not the room’s chill, but a deep, invasive freeze radiating from the needle taped to the back of my hand. Milky poison – Thorazine, Jess had called it – dripped relentlessly into my vein, turning my blood to sludge, my thoughts to tar. My eyelids were lead weights. Annulment. Eve’s word sliced through the fog, sharp and cruel. Why sever the marriage? To strip me bare before the kill? To erase me completely? The Pete debt was a chain, but this felt personal. Vicious.I forced my eyes open. The world swam – the bolted bed, the padded door, the blinding overhead light. Alone. Restraints bit into my wrists and ankles, leather gnawing at skin already raw. Panic tried to surge, a trapped bird fluttering against my ribs, but the Thorazine smothered it, leaving only a dull, distant thud. Think, Lucia. Past the poison.Jess’s voice, a fragile lifeline: "Hold the pills..."But they weren’t giving pills anymore. Just injections. Faster. Deeper. Harder.

The car wasn’t Adam’s usual armored beast. It was sleek, low, and fast, the engine a muted growl eating up the miles of sun-baked highway. California unfurled outside the window – impossibly blue sky, golden hills, the first teasing glimpses of the vast, grey-blue Pacific. It should have felt like freedom. It felt like another gilded cage on wheels.Adam drove like a man possessed, jaw clenched, knuckles white on the wheel. The silence between us wasn’t companionable; it was a live wire, humming with everything unsaid. My body still felt heavy, hollowed out by the Thorazine residue. My wrist throbbed where the restraints had bitten deepest. The compact’s sharp corner was a reassuring weight in the pocket of the borrowed sweatpants George had thrust at me before we fled St. Mary’s like thieves.He hadn’t spoken beyond terse directions since bundling me into the car, Eve’s crumpled annulment paper crushed in his fist before he’d tossed it onto the back seat like toxic waste. Every time

His hand closed around the gun’s grip. Time froze. The crash of waves faded to a dull roar in my ears. I braced for the sound of the slide racking, for the window rolling down, for the Lancaster violence erupting once more. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in the cage of my terror.But Adam didn’t pull the gun out. He didn’t even lift it from the glove compartment. His knuckles whitened on the polymer grip, tendons standing out on his forearm like steel cables. He held perfectly still, staring out at the deepening shadows beneath the cypress trees bordering the property. His breathing was shallow, controlled.Seconds stretched into an eternity. The only movement was the rise and fall of his chest and the slow, deliberate uncurling of his fingers from the weapon. He released the grip as if it had burned him. Then, with a visible effort that seemed to drain him, he pushed the glove compartment shut with a soft click.He turned his head slowly towards me. The raw

Adam’s fevered whisper – "She didn't jump" – echoed in the hollows of my skull long after I stumbled back to my room. It coiled around the remnants of the Thorazine still lurking in my veins, a chilling counterpoint to the chemical fog. Sleep, when it finally came, wasn’t rest. It was a drowning descent into fractured nightmares: white walls closing in, Eve’s crimson smile, the cold bite of restraints, and always, the sound of a body hitting pavement far below.I woke to sunlight stabbing my eyes like shards of glass. My head pounded with a vicious, nauseating rhythm that seemed to sync with the distant crash of waves. The simple act of opening my eyes sent the room tilting violently. Sweat plastered the borrowed pajamas to my skin, but beneath it, a deep, bone-aching chill had taken root. The Thorazine, held at bay by adrenaline and terror, was claiming its due.A moan escaped my lips before I could stop it. The sound triggered a wave of nausea so intense it doubled me over. I barely