A caught

Audrey's POVThe Hellcat smelled like oil and cold metal and something that had always, since I was small enough to fit under a car without a jack, meant safety.I sat in the driver's seat with the door open and my feet on the garage floor and didn't drive anywhere. Just sat. The way I'd been doing since I was thirteen and using the car as a place to put myself when there was nowhere else that fit.The garage was empty at this hour. Everyone else had gone in when the temperature dropped. The academy perimeter lights hummed their low steady hum and the mountain did its dark thing outside and I sat in the Hellcat and tried to find the edges of what I was feeling.Luca was silent and it bugged me.One second too long. That was all it had taken. One second of him not saying no immediately and the whole architecture of my chest had shifted.I put my head back against the headrest.The bond was doing something I hadn't felt it do before. Yes. The bond didn't break, that wasn't how it worked

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Chapter 99

Audrey's POVOkay so. Six a.m. and I actually slept. Like, slept-slept and not just the fake kind where you lie there replaying the bench and the hallway and that one pause on repeat until your brain just gives up from exhaustion. Real sleep. Then real morning. Then that washed-out October light doing its thing through the curtains.I just laid there for a sec doing an inventory.Wolf was quiet more like she'd been up all night sorting through garbage and actually finished the job for once. Came out the other side with her stuff together.Felt like patience, honestly. Weird to feel that from her. I got up, threw on clothes, went down before anyone else was awake.Kitchen was empty, freezing, and I made my own coffee for the first time in forever because apparently I'd just been letting Luca or Adrian handle that without even clocking it. Made it exactly how I like it. Climbed up on the counter, mug in both hands, stared at the mountain, breathed.Bond was still buzzing on that weird f

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Chapter 100

Audrey's POVI walked out of the cafeteria with Ethan and I did not look back.A conscious choice. Made with my whole chest and zero apology. The bond told me exactly what all three of them were feeling without me having to turn around — Theo's specific loud silence, Adrian's calculating stillness, and Luca's jaw doing the thing it did when he was keeping something controlled that wanted out.I let the door close behind me and breathed the cold morning air and felt, for the first time since Friday night, something happening on my terms.It felt good."You okay?" Ethan said, falling into step beside me. He asked because he paid attention, because he'd clocked the specific quality of my okay this morning."Getting there," I said.He nodded and we walked toward the academic building with the cold doing its October thing and it was easy the way things were easy when nobody was performing anything."First period?" he said."Vehicle dynamics," I said. "You?""Same building," he said. "I'll

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Chapter 101

Audrey's POVThe front door opened quietly because I opened it quietly and I walked into the villa and Luca was standing in the hallway.Not blocking it. Not positioned dramatically. Just standing there the way he had been standing at the window — completely still, hands at his sides, the composed face entirely absent and nothing replacing it yet.We looked at each other.The hallway was narrow and warm and smelled like whatever Theo had cooked earlier and the bond between us was doing something so loud it was almost physical, a frequency I felt in my sternum rather than my chest.I walked past him.Not fast. Not slow. Just past, the way you walked past furniture, the way you moved through a space that had something in it you were not ready to address yet, and I felt him not reach for me and I felt myself not stop and both of those things cost something but I kept walking anyway.Up the stairs.My room.I closed the door.---The villa had a specific atmosphere for the rest of the nig

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Chapter 102

Audrey's POVI walked to his door.The corridor was dark and cold and the villa was completely quiet around me and I walked to his door and stood in it and looked at him.He was on the floor.Back against the bed, legs stretched out, sketchbook open across his lap. Not sitting the way he sat in chairs — composed, deliberate, the posture of someone who had chosen how to occupy a space. This was the floor version of Luca, the one that did not exist in public, the one that only happened when the human part of him had given up on maintaining the architecture and just — sat down.He was drawing.I looked at the sketchbook.It took me a second to understand what I was seeing because Luca drew structures, Luca drew floor plans and load-bearing calculations and the architectural signatures of things that needed to stand up, and this was not any of those things.It was the garage.Specifically it was the Hellcat, and me, standing the way I stood when I had both hands on the engine and was thin

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Semua Bab Driving The Alpha' Brothers Crazy : Bab 101 - Bab 105

A caught

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102