CORRUPT ME (GIVING MY INNOCENCE TO MY BROTHER'S BESTFRIEND) のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 80

"The moment you stop letting someone else fight your battles is the moment you understand your own strength."MYRAMy father arrived at noon.I heard the car before I saw him — the particular sound of a vehicle moving with purpose up the private road, the kind of arrival that had energy before it had presence. I was in the living room with a book I hadn't been reading when the door opened and my father walked in and the temperature of the room changed the way it always changed when Marco Rossi entered a space.He looked at me first.The way he always did, that immediate parental inventory, checking for damage the way I'd watched him check buildings after storms — systematically, starting with the structure before moving to the details. I watched him find me whole and watched the specific relief of it move through him before anything else had a chance to.Then he crossed the room and hugged me.My father was not a demonstrative man in public. In private, with me specifically, he had al

"Some promises aren't made with words. They're made with the specific way someone looks at you when they say them."MYRAIt was late when I asked.Past midnight, the house quiet around us, the kind of settled darkness that belonged to hours when the rest of the world had stopped and it was just the two of you and whatever was true between you.We were in bed. Not sleeping. I'd been lying in the dark for a while, listening to his breathing, feeling the warmth of him beside me, and thinking the thoughts I usually managed to keep quieter than this. The ones that lived in the space between knowing you were safe right now and knowing right now wasn't a permanent condition.The gala kept coming back. Not in a panicked way, not with the visceral quality it had carried in the immediate aftermath. Just quietly. The specific sound of a gunshot in an enclosed space. The motion of being moved behind someone before I'd understood I needed to be.The smile on the man against the wall.This was only

"The most effective trap is the one that looks like a door someone opened for you."JEREMYThe call came from a number Myra would recognize.That was the detail that had required the most patience to arrange. Not the logistics of the van, not the route, not the coordination with Damon's men who were professional enough that working with them had been straightforward once the alliance was established. Those parts were mechanical. Solvable problems with solvable solutions.The number was the art of it.He'd spent three weeks on that specific detail. Watching, mapping, understanding the architecture of her daily life well enough to identify the single point of contact that would make her move without thinking. Without checking. Without doing the careful, sensible thing that Zyran had spent months training her to do.The answer had been obvious once he'd found it.Not Luca. Luca she'd call back before going anywhere. Not her mother, whose voice she knew too well to be fooled by anything a

"Sometimes the evidence of love doesn't look like love at all. Sometimes it looks like obsession. And sometimes, if you look closer, it looks like grief."LUCAI found it by accident.That was the honest truth of it. I wasn't looking for anything specific when I went through the house — I was moving the way I moved when I needed to feel useful and didn't have enough information yet to be useful in any directed way. Nikolai was running data. Cristian was locking down exit points. Zyran was in the security room doing things I didn't have the access to do alongside him.So I moved through the house.Not searching for evidence. Just moving. The particular restless energy of a man whose sister had been taken and who had to do something with his hands or lose his mind entirely.I'd been through the main floor. The library, which still had her book open on the arm of the chair, a folded receipt marking her page. The kitchen, where Elena's morning preparations were still half-finished on the

"The things we hide the hardest are never hidden from the people who love us most. They're just waiting for us to be ready."MYRAIt happened two days after we came home.Not planned. Nothing about it was planned. We were all in the living room of the estate — my parents, Luca, Zyran, all of us in the same space for the first time since everything, the particular exhausted quiet of people who had been through something large and were still finding the edges of it.My mother had made tea. That was her response to most things — the ritual of making something warm and carrying it to people, the oldest form of care she knew. She'd been moving around us since we got back, touching my shoulder when she passed, smoothing my hair the way she'd done when I was small, making food none of us were eating properly.My father was in the armchair by the window. He'd aged in the last forty eight hours in a way I noticed and didn't comment on. The particular aging of a man who'd understood something a