Semua Bab Bound By Vengeance : Bab 31 - Bab 40

The echo of her silence followed me down the corridor.Not her words. Not her threats. Her silence.That silence was sharper than any blade. A refusal to give me what I wanted—yet a gift all the same.Defiance that wasn’t spoken but simmered beneath every look, every stiff line of her body, every tremble she thought she hid.God, she was magnificent.I let the moment replay in my mind, each detail carved into me with the precision of a scar. The tight line of her jaw. The tremor in her fingers as she set her glass down. The way her eyes burned when they met mine—hating me, needing me, fighting me.It was a storm.And storms had always belonged to me.I stepped into my private study, closing the heavy oak door behind me. The fire had burned low in the hearth, shadows stretching across the room like claws eager to drag me deeper into the dark. I didn’t light more candles. I wanted the shadows tonight. I wanted the quiet, the press of blackness, the pulse of my thoughts uninterrupted.I

The house was quiet at dawn.Too quiet for most to notice—but not for me. Silence was never just silence. It had texture, weight, a pulse of its own if you listened closely enough. I had learned long ago how to measure the stillness between walls, how to hear what others tried to conceal.Selena’s silence was the loudest of all.It pressed against the stone of her chambers like a storm straining at the edges of a cage. Sharp. Restless. Heavy with defiance. She hadn’t slept. I didn’t need to see her to know. The air carried the raw scent of her unrest.Good.Let her rage. Let her burn herself hollow. Let her fight shadows in the dark until exhaustion carved its way into her bones.Because when the fire flickered low, she would find only me standing in the ashes.I stood by the tall window of my study, the world still half-asleep beyond the glass. The gardens stretched below, hushed in the pale breath of morning. The horizon bled with weak sunlight—thin, inadequate compared to the heat

There is an art to watching a woman unravel. It is almost surgical: observe, wait, prod the exact nerve until the reaction is inevitable. I have practiced finer things than people—on fortunes, on reputations—but Selena is a study all her own. She is unpredictable in the best possible way. Her edges are raw; her resistance is elegant; her anger rings truer than most people's love. It makes everything worthwhile.I ease forward again, slowly, as if drawn by the fountain’s rhythm. The water throws light in fragments across her cheek, and I map the planes of her face like a man reading a ledger. Every micro-expression is an entry: a tightened brow, a softened mouth, a blink that lasts one breath too long. I store them all.“You measure everything,” she once told me. Accusation, disguised as fact. I smiled then; I smile now. Measurement is merely discipline. Discipline gives you the means to shape fate.She flinches when a breeze lifts the edges of her hair. I let the breeze take the blame

There is a particular silence at dawn in houses such as mine—an expectancy that smells faintly of old money and the rustle of silk. It is a silence I have cultivated because the quiet reveals truths others cannot see. This morning, that silence thrummed with the memory of her: the way she had walked, the slight tremor at her wrist, the way she kept looking to see if I followed. I knew precisely which private doors had closed behind her and which thoughts would crowd her like restless guests.The whiskey sat heavy in my stomach, its warmth a small echo of the heat I wanted to stoke in her. I set the glass down deliberately and began to imagine the day as a map—nodes of influence, moments to be used. A breakfast where she would see me casual, unthreatening. A lesson—an etiquette demonstration disguised as civility—to show her that the rules here were my choosing. A late afternoon interlude in the library where books kept secrets and hands could "accidentally" brush. Each point on the ma

Yet I am not blind to danger. Pride can harden into a weapon that punctures carefully laid strategies. That is why I leave openings not for her to cut me off, but for her to reaffirm my guidance. When a woman thinks she has saved herself from me by some clever maneuver, she doubles down to prove her sovereignty. It is then I offer the double-headed kindness: the compliment that is praise and the reprimand that is concerned. She will mistake both for care.I take small notes in my head—how she folds her fingers when annoyed, what color her eyes flash when she speaks of the past, the exact cadence in her voice when she says 'I am not yours.' They are the coordinates of my plan. Later, I will return to them like an archivist, pulling out evidence of my design and presenting them as if she, not I, recognized the path. Ownership, when rewritten by memory, is the most permanent kind.There are men who break quickly, who win and then wonder why their spoils are hollow. I prefer the slow burn