جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 210

Chapter 201"You clearly don't know him as well as you think," Dante said, quiet, deliberate. "Because if you did, you wouldn't be standing in my classroom telling me his engagement is solid and real and good. You'd know it's not. You'd know he broke it off weeks ago — told Alyssa himself, told his own mother there was someone else, stood in a hospital room and said out loud that he wasn't going to spend his life pretending to be something he isn't for a woman who deserves someone who actually wants her. That's not a man clinging to something real, Rhys. That's a man who already made his choice and is trying to figure out what comes after it. You don't get to rewrite that into a story where I'm the villain who broke something that was already broken long before I showed up."Something in Rhys's face shifted — not quite surprise, more the specific, unwelcome recalibration of a man discovering his own certainty had been built on information that was already out of date."He ended it," R

Chapter 203 "He knows about Jayce," Dante said, deciding, in the moment, that there wasn't a gentle way into this, no version of the story that softened without also delaying, and delaying felt, tonight, like its own small betrayal of the promise they'd made. "About the kiss, at the hospital. I don't know exactly how he found out — he didn't say, and I didn't get the chance to ask before things got ugly. But he knew, specifically, and he came to my classroom to tell me to stay away from Jayce.""Ugly how," Ravyn said, her voice gone carefully even in the particular way it went when she was holding something back to let him finish first.Dante told her. All of it — the accusations of cheating, the specific cruelty of the language Rhys had reached for, the way his own hands had curled into fists before he'd forced them back open, the reason he'd forced them back open at all. He told her about the warning regarding Jayce and Alyssa, about telling Rhys that the engagement was already ove

Chapter 205 The call came in at eleven at night, and Marcello knew, before he'd even looked at the screen, exactly who it was going to be, because there was only one number left in his contacts capable of making his stomach drop the way it dropped now.He answered anyway. There wasn't a version of tonight where not answering solved anything."You told me it was handled," Miles said, no greeting, his voice carrying the specific flat, controlled fury of a man who did not raise his voice because he'd never needed to. Men who raised their voices were men who hadn't yet learned that quiet was more frightening. "You told me the device was reliable. You told me, specifically, that the driver would not walk away from that finish line. I paid you an obscene amount of money for a guarantee, Marcello, and what I got instead was two hundred thousand strangers on the internet watching him survive it.""There was a malfunction," Marcello said, keeping his own voice level, though something cold had

Chapter 207 She found the time three days later, a rare quiet Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled, Dante out running errands, and R sprawled across the living room floor with a coloring book he'd mostly abandoned in favor of simply talking, uninterrupted, for the first time in what felt like weeks."Mama," he said, not looking up from the crayon he was rolling idly between his palms. "Remember the boy I told you about? From the park?""The one who's good at climbing," Ravyn said, settling onto the floor beside him, genuinely present this time, no phone buzzing, no dentist appointment looming, no dinner boiling over on the stove behind her."Yeah," R said, brightening immediately at being remembered correctly. "He's still there sometimes. When we go with Jayce.""Tell me about him," Ravyn said, and meant it, this time, the specific warm attention of a parent finally giving a story the room it had been asking for across three failed attempts weeks ago.R considered this with the

Chapter 209 — The Battle LineJayce went to see Rhys on a Friday afternoon.He didn't call first. He knew that if he called, Rhys would find a reason to be busy. A meeting. A flight. A dinner he couldn't move. Rhys was good at that. He had always been good at that, even when they were boys.So Jayce just went.The receptionist on the top floor smiled at him the way she always did. She didn't stop him. Nobody at Larsen Enterprises ever stopped Jayce Whitmore. He had been walking through these halls since he was fourteen years old, back when Rhys's father still ran the place and the two of them used to sneak into the boardroom to spin in the big leather chairs.He thought about that as he walked. The chairs. The way Rhys used to laugh back then, loud and easy, before he learned to hold everything in.Jayce had spent two days getting ready for this talk. He had played it in his head over and over, in the shower, in the car, lying awake at night. In every version, Rhys was shaken. Maybe a