All Chapters of Switched at the Mafia Auction: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

~ Avelyn ~I unfolded the letter with hands that didn’t feel like mine.Kyle’s handwriting was unmistakable. Careful. Slanted slightly to the right. As if even ink needed permission before taking up space. My breath caught before I read a single word, because seeing his name like this—here, in this house felt like a breach of reality.He didn’t waste time.He told me he had a plan, not a hope or a possibility. A plan.He said it wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be clean, but it would work. He said I would have two weeks to decide. Two weeks to prepare myself. Two weeks to write back if I wanted him to move.If I didn’t respond, he would assume my silence was an answer.I read the letter three times.Then I folded it carefully and slid it back into the envelope like it might shatter if I wasn’t gentle.Two weeks.The number followed me everywhere after that.The days blurred together in a way that felt deliberate, as though time itself had been neutralized in this place. Morning light

~ Avelyn ~Normal is a performance.I learned that by the morning. Normal is waking when the curtains are drawn back by a maid who smiles too politely.Normal is bathing, dressing, eating food that tastes like nothing, answering questions that aren’t really questions.Normal is walking the same halls, hearing the same footsteps behind me, feeling watched without ever catching the watcher blinking.Normal is surviving.I mastered it quickly.By the time the sun rose today, I already knew what day it was.Fourteen days.Two weeks since the letter had arrived in my hands like a live wire. Two weeks since Kyle’s handwriting burned into my thoughts every waking moment. Two weeks of not answering. Two weeks of silence that felt louder than any scream.Today, I had to decide.Or at least—I had to pretend I could.I sat at the edge of the bed and stared at my hands. They looked steady. Calm. The hands of a woman who wasn’t unraveling slowly from the inside out. The hands of someone who sl

~ Avelyn ~I woke up already braced for absence.That was the first thing I noticed about myself—that I expected Xander to be gone the way one expects silence after a storm. The way you expect damage, but not the thing that caused it.The bed was cold on the other side.Of course it was. He had never been here. Not really. But my body didn’t seem to know the difference anymore. It searched the room for weight, for presence, for proof that the tension I’d gone to sleep with hadn’t been imagined.Nothing.Just the pale ceiling. The quiet hum of the compound. The distant footfalls of guards changing shifts. Good, he had left this place entirely. I exhaled slowly and pressed my palm flat against my stomach before I could stop myself.Stop.I forced my hand away like it had burned me.One day. That was how it had been. One day after my reply to Kyle and more than a month since the yacht. Since men I didn’t know had carried me away like fragile cargo while the sea blurred into something un

~ Avelyn ~I expected cold.That was what I braced myself for as I stepped into Xander’s wing. It would be the usual shape silence, that was enough to cut, with distance enforced like law and his presence felt but not offered. I had rehearsed my spine, my defiance, the careful neutrality that had kept me alive this long.What I hadn’t prepared for was this.The dining room was lit, not brightly, but deliberately. Warm amber lights suspended low over a long table set for two. Not a banquet. Not an interrogation setup. Intimate in a way that immediately made my skin prickle. It almost looked…romantic.Xander was already there.He rose when he saw me.That alone knocked the air from my lungs.He didn’t rush, didn’t smile either. He simply stood, tall and immovable, dressed in dark slacks and a crisp shirt with the sleeves buttoned at his wrists. Controlled and composed. The kind of man who never wasted motion.“Avelyn,” he said.My name sounded different in his mouth tonight. Not summone

~ Avelyn ~“Eat.”That was all he said.Not a suggestion, not a command sharpened by threat. Just the word quiet and final before he returned to his seat like nothing had happened. He sat there now like he hadn’t just upended my entire nervous system with a kiss and a sentence I still couldn’t make sense of.While I stood there for a moment longer than necessary, my pulse still lodged somewhere in my throat, before I forced my legs to move. Sitting again felt like surrender, but standing felt worse like I was exposed and unanchored.So I sat.The chair felt colder now.Xander picked up his cutlery with the same measured ease as before. No rush. No glance in my direction. He took a sip of wine, slow, deliberate, as though time bent around him and waited its turn.The silence stretched.It wasn’t awkward enough and that was the problem.I could hear everything in it—the faint clink of metal against porcelain, the low hum of electricity in the walls, my own breathing, which I tried and