Lahat ng Kabanata ng Tangled With The Other Brother: Kabanata 291 - Kabanata 300

Jaxx's Point Of View"Who the hell are you?!" he shouted, his voice echoing sharply across the stone patio. The other nine men spun around, weapons raising in unison, eyes locking onto me. I could hear the metallic clack-clack of safety switches being flicked off, a sound that usually made a sane man freeze in his tracks. But right now, sanity wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse. Somewhere behind my ribs, a cold, focused fury had taken the wheel, and it didn't care much for the odds stacked against us. I thought of Elena, of the last time I'd heard her voice, and the fury sharpened into something almost sacred. I didn't stop walking. Instead, I raised both hands in the air in a mock gesture of surrender, palms open, fingers loose. I plastered a calm, almost lazy smile on my face, rolling my shoulders casually as I continued closing the distance. My boots crunched softly against the gravel, each step deliberate, unhurried, designed to unnerve rather than provoke. Behind me, Liam and th

Elena's Point Of ViewThe heavy wooden door clicked shut, the sound echoing through the cavernous space like a gunshot. I stood completely frozen in the center of the grand room, my breath catching in my dry throat. The silence that followed was suffocating, pressing against my eardrums until I could hear nothing but the frantic thudding of my own pulse.I waited, counting the seconds in my head, hoping against hope that I was just having some horrific, vivid nightmare, that I would wake up in my own bed in Dallas with nothing worse than a bad hangover to deal with. But the sharp, throbbing ache behind my temples was all too real, and so was the cold marble beneath my bare feet. Slowly, I forced my legs to move. The expensive, champagne-colored silk slip dress clung to my skin, shifting with a soft rustle that made me want to rip it off and burn it, to erase every trace of the hands that had dressed me while I was unconscious. I walked toward the massive door, my bare feet sinking i

Elena's Point Of View"What?" The word barely escaped me. It was just a thin, hollow breath that dissolved in the air between us, swallowed whole before it could mean anything. My ears rang so loudly I thought my eardrums might burst, but beneath the high-pitched hum, the dull, wet impact of another boot hitting Jaxx's ribs echoed like thunder across the courtyard.Every fiber of my being wanted to run to him, to throw myself between his broken body and the men still circling him, but my legs refused to move, frozen in place by a terror I had never known before, a paralysis that felt like betrayal in itself. Graham smiled, his eyes soft, almost gentle, which only made the skin on the back of my neck prickle with absolute revulsion. He raised his hand, his thumb resting against my jawline while his fingers cupped my chin. He rubbed the bone with a slow, deliberate pressure, tilting my face up so I had no choice but to look at him.There was something obscene about the tenderness in h

Elena's Point Of ViewThe floorboards were cold under my palms. I didn't move for a long time. I just lay there on my side, my cheek pressed against the plush cream rug, watching dust motes float through a sharp beam of Italian sunlight. My throat felt raw, like I'd swallowed sand, and every breath I took rattled in my chest.The silence pressed down on me, thick and suffocating, broken only by the distant cry of gulls somewhere beyond the locked window. Somewhere in that silence, I thought I could hear my own heartbeat, slow and stubborn, refusing to let me disappear into the numbness creeping at the edges of my mind. Three days. That was seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours on a clock that was already ticking down, each second heavy and suffocating. I could almost hear it counting, a phantom metronome ticking away inside my skull, mocking me with every passing breath. I tried to imagine what those hours would look like, stacked one on top of another like stones building a wall I

A/N: An Extra chapter to apologize for the delay in upates.Elena's Point Of View"No take-backs, Elena," Graham said softly, his voice dropping into that quiet, dangerous register he used when closing a multi-million dollar merger. "You give me your word in this room, you don't get to slide back into your little heroic defiance tomorrow morning. You don't get to change your mind." I didn't say a single word. I just let my chin drop lower, keeping my throat tight, letting another wet tear trace its way down my jawline. I couldn't push it too far… I knew Graham wasn't daft. He wasn't some naive fool who'd fall for a dramatic 180-degree turn without checking for the knife behind my back. The man was a shark, and sharks could smell blood from miles away, even blood that wasn't really there. He'd made his fortune sniffing out weaknesses and calculating leverage before anyone else even knew a game was being played. If I overacted… if I suddenly started smiling or acting thrilled to be