Semua Bab Spoiled By My Overprotective Brothers : Bab 131 - Bab 140

The moment after silence breaks is never loud. That was the lie people believed—that escalation announced itself with explosions, with raised voices, with blood on pavement and headlines written too quickly. In truth, the most dangerous moment came after the fracture, when everyone realized the rules had shifted but no one yet knew what the new ones were. Liana woke with that understanding already settled in her bones. The estate no longer felt suspended. It felt alert in a different way, as though the structure itself had leaned forward, listening for the next sound rather than holding its breath against it. The quiet was no longer restraint. It was anticipation. She dressed slowly, deliberately, grounding herself in routine because routine reminded her that control did not vanish just because pressure increased. Outside her window, the sky was heavy with cloud, the kind that promised rain without offering it yet, and she recognized the parallel immediately. The storm was comin

Waiting, Liana had learned, was not the absence of movement. It was a discipline. The two days she had granted Serov stretched not as empty hours but as tightly wound intervals, each one humming with intention, every moment thick with decisions not yet spoken aloud. The estate adjusted around that waiting as though it recognized the shift—guards moved with quieter steps, conversations softened before they fully formed, and even the halls seemed to carry sound differently, absorbing it rather than letting it echo. Liana woke early on the first day, not from anxiety but from awareness. Her mind had already been working for hours before her eyes opened, tracing possibilities and contingencies, mapping outcomes that branched and folded back on themselves like living things. She lay still for several minutes, staring at the ceiling, reminding herself that the art of stillness required restraint as much as foresight.

Aftershocks never announced themselves with drama.They crept in through routine, through moments that should have been ordinary, through conversations that felt familiar until they weren’t. Liana understood this as she returned to the estate, the weight of the meeting still threaded through her awareness, not as anxiety but as residue. Something had moved. Not visibly, not violently—but permanently.The gates closed behind them with their usual muted authority, steel sliding into place with a sound she had heard a thousand times before. Yet today, it carried a different meaning. Not safety. Not confinement.Boundary.Viktor removed his coat as they entered the main hall, his movements unhurried, his composure intact, but she knew him well enough now to recognize the subtle signs of recalibration—the way his shoulders settled, the way his gaze tracked space rather than people, already anticipating adjustments that would need to be made.“You didn’t blink,” he said finally, breaking th

The message arrived without sound.No alarm. No urgency. No coded warning that something catastrophic had finally tipped the balance. It appeared quietly on a secure channel that had not been used in years, the kind of channel that existed only for moments when subtlety mattered more than speed.Liana read it once.Then again.Not because it was unclear, but because clarity carried weight.Serov had chosen his point.The message was simple in structure, carefully restrained in tone, and devastating in implication. There was no threat spelled out, no demand framed as coercion. Instead, it offered a scenario—a conditional future constructed with the precision of someone who understood how people made decisions under pressure.He was not asking for compliance.He was presenting a choice.Viktor found her in the study moments later, already sensing the shift before she spoke.“He moved,”

Restraint did not shatter the way violence did.It thinned.It stretched until it became translucent, until everyone involved could see through it clearly enough to understand that the only thing holding it in place was choice, not capability. Liana felt that thinning long before the first unmistakable sign appeared, the way one sensed pressure change before a storm finally broke.Serov had stopped pretending.The morning reports were not subtle anymore. They were still controlled, still measured, but the careful indirection was gone. Actions that once passed through three layers of deniability were now moving with only one, sometimes none at all. It wasn’t recklessness. It was irritation made operational.“He’s losing patience,” Viktor said as they stood over the table in the strategy room, the glow of projected data reflecting off his composed expression.“No,” Liana replied quietly. “He’s losing restraint.”