All Chapters of Shadows of Desire: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

I found him where the lights sleep.Elysium without music feels like a cathedral after mass—perfume and electricity clinging to velvet and stone, chandeliers ticking softly as they settle. The main floor was empty, the stage bare, the rigs coiled like quiet serpents against the wall. Victor stood in the middle of it all as if he had always been a part of the architecture—handsome and immovable, a pillar of will no velvet could soften. His suit jacket lay folded on the arm of a leather couch, his white shirt open at the collar, and yet there was nothing undone about him. He looked like a verdict.He didn’t turn when I stepped in. My boots made careful sounds on the black floor. I realized I was holding my breath the way you do in a museum, reverent and terrified of the alarm.“Victor,” I said.“Close the door, Cassandra.” His voice was soft, and the door felt very loud sealing behind me.He held a sheet of paper in his left hand. Even at a distance I knew what it was. The draft—my draf

I wake to the same pale square of light on the ceiling and for a moment I forget—my body reaching for a warmth that isn’t there, my hand finding only the cold slope of the pillow. That second of mercy cracks open and all of it comes back: the way his voice clipped the night clean, the way the door closed behind me, the way the cab glass kept my face from breaking.I don’t turn on music. Silence is honest, and I think I owe myself that much. The kettle hisses and clicks off and I stand there holding a mug like it might hold me back. The apartment is too neat, the kind of neatness you get when you don’t trust yourself to stop once you start scrubbing. I made the bed with corners you could bounce a coin off. I folded laundry with military precision. I wiped a countertop that didn’t need wiping until the cloth left a dark path my eyes could follow anywhere but inside.My laptop sits on the table, lid closed. I deleted everything last night. The drafts, the notes, the outlines with clever

The city feels colder without Elysium. Or maybe that’s just me, shivering as I walk streets that no longer belong to me, replaying every word Victor hurled at me, every flicker of hurt in his eyes. It wasn’t just anger—he looked… wounded. And I did that.I can’t sleep. Nights bleed into mornings, and every hour is heavy with silence. I tell myself to write, to keep my hands busy, but the blank page stares back accusingly. What good are words when they’ve already destroyed the only place I ever felt at home?Yet even from the outside, I can feel the storm building inside those velvet walls. Elysium has always had its own heartbeat, and I swear I can still sense it, faint and unsteady. I imagine Victor pacing, his voice low and clipped as he calls for order. I picture Jennifer leaning against some polished table, eyes sharp, daring anyone to point a finger her way. And Marco… Marco would be buried in data, chasing trails across security feeds, trying to stitch sense into chaos.The thou

I woke with a start, heart pounding, as though someone had slammed a door inside my chest. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t the city outside that jolted me awake but the weight of what I knew had happened at Elysium.Jennifer was gone.Even without seeing it, without hearing the words, I felt the fracture in the club’s foundation ripple outward. Elysium had always been a place where secrets pressed in from every angle, but betrayal—true betrayal—was something different. It echoed. It left silence where there should have been laughter, left suspicion where there should have been trust.I sat up in bed, pulling the blanket around my shoulders, and let myself imagine the moment.Victor, standing with his hands braced against the edge of his desk, his voice like ice when he told her to leave. Marco watching quietly from the corner, his expression heavy with disappointment. And Jennifer—Jennifer, who never bowed to anyone—probably straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and walked

The city has a way of swallowing you when you’re alone. By day, its noise can trick you into feeling less empty—car horns, footsteps, chatter bleeding through thin apartment walls—but at night, the silence comes rushing back, pressing against the windows, filling every corner like a tide you can’t escape.Tonight, it pressed especially hard.I sat at the small kitchen table, the glow of my laptop illuminating the half-empty mug of tea beside it. The cursor blinked on the screen, a steady pulse that mocked me. My article draft sat open, paragraphs of careful observation and hidden yearning staring back at me like a wound I kept reopening.I had written these words before I belonged. Before Victor’s voice became the compass I followed, before Elysium had felt like home. I had written them as an outsider, an intruder peering into a world I didn’t deserve.And now, in exile, the temptation to let those words out clawed at me.What if I sent it anonymously? What if I stripped my name from