All Chapters of TIED IN HIS BED: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

The city was burning again at least, that’s how it felt in Carson’s mind.Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the flicker of flames reflected in Justina’s eyes that night, the night everything had nearly been lost.Now, as he stood before the glass walls of his penthouse, watching the morning light climb the horizon, the world seemed deceptively calm.Justina stirred awake on the sofa behind him. She had fallen asleep in her travel clothes, exhausted from the chaos of the last twenty-four hours, the confrontation at the charity gala, the revelation about Sloane’s will, and the whispered threats that still haunted them both.Carson turned, watching her shoulders rise and fall gently with each breath. For a man who built empires from ashes, he suddenly found himself terrified of losing one thing he couldn’t buy back.Justina woke slowly, her vision hazy, the faint scent of rain and smoke lingering in the air.Her gaze found Carson, standing like a shadow carved from steel and light. H

The truth had a sound.It wasn’t loud, it was soft like the faint crackle of something burning slowly out of sight.When Justina woke that morning, Carson was gone. The sheets beside her were cold, the imprint of his body already fading. For a moment she thought it had all been a dream, his confession, her tears and the word Project Ashes ringing in her ears like an unfinished prayer.But the folder still sat on the dresser. The proof was real. The lie was real.And so was the ache inside her chest.She rose, barefoot, crossing the polished floors of the penthouse. Outside, the city gleamed gold, a sky full of glass and fire. It looked so peaceful. So impossibly calm. She hated it for that.Carson returned hours later, his shirt half undone, his expression carved from exhaustion and guilt. He didn’t expect her to be awake. But there she was, sitting on the couch, the file open on the table between them like a body neither of them wanted to bury.“Where were you?” she asked quietly.“C

The safehouse was quiet except for the faint hum of rain against the roof, steady and relentless like the heartbeat of a world that refused to die.Justina sat cross-legged on the cold floor, the encrypted drive before her. The small silver device gleamed under a flickering bulb, its edges scorched from the explosion. Carson watched her from across the room, his back against the wall, one hand absently rubbing the scar along his wrist. the reminder of how close they’d come to losing everything.Neither spoke. The silence between them was sacred now.When she finally reached for the drive, her hands trembled. Not with fear with something worse. Anticipation.Her mother’s voice echoed in her head. “If you find this, baby, it means I’ve failed to protect you. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll succeed where I couldn’t.”She connected the drive to Mason’s old terminal. Lines of code filled the screen, green symbols dancing like ghosts.“Password required,” the system blinked.Justina frowned.

The hum began as a whisper, a slow and trembling vibration that seemed to seep up through the floor and into their bones.Carson’s flashlight flickered once, twice, then went out completely.The vault lit itself from within.The pods along the walls shimmered, each one pulsing to the same rhythm as Justina’s heartbeat. The golden light deepened, bleeding into scarlet, then back to gold again, like breathing fire.She took a cautious step forward. “It’s responding to me.”Carson caught her arm. “Or warning you.”She shook free, eyes locked on the central core. The engraving of the phoenix now glowed red-hot, the metal trembling.“It’s alive, Carson. She made it alive.”He moved beside her, his voice low. “Then we end this before it wakes the rest.”She looked at him, really looked like the man who had once been her enemy, her captor, her impossible truth.“If we destroy it,” she whispered, “we erase her legacy. We erase everything.”He cupped her face, thumb brushing the faint scar al

The world had changed.Two months after the Phoenix Event, humanity stood on the edge of something new cities alive with bioluminescent vines that pulsed with quiet rhythm, energy grids powered by invisible currents, and skies that shimmered in colors no one had seen before.They called it The Renewal.Carson called it her.Every dawn, when the light broke over the horizon in waves of amber and violet, he felt her presence in the wind, soft laughter hidden in the rustle of leaves, her heartbeat echoing faintly in the pulse of the earth.He had tried to move on. Tried to rebuild. But grief had its own gravity, pulling him back to the ashes of what they’d been.And yet… somewhere deep within the world she had remade, something still called to him.It began as a faint pulse, a rhythmic flicker across the network monitors, buried beneath layers of encrypted code. A pattern only he would recognize.Carson froze.The sequence repeated: 13-9-20-5-14.Her initials.“J.N.”His heart stuttered.