All Chapters of The Lost Heir: Chapter 61 - Chapter 65

His rooms were different from hers.Celeste had never been inside them before — he had always come to her, which she understood now as its own kind of control. His rooms were larger, darker, the furniture heavier, the window facing the mountain rather than the valley. A table had been set near the window, candles lit, two places, something that smelled of braised meat coming from the covered dishes on the sideboard. It was beautiful. She registered that before she could stop herself.Kendra stood at the sideboard. Celeste had arranged it that way — a quiet word that morning, Kendra's face giving nothing. She was there to serve. That was all anyone needed to know.Vargr was waiting. He looked at Celeste when she came through the door with the expression she had learned to read over three months — pleased, anticipating, a man holding something he was about to give. Something in her chest responded before her mind caught up. The groove held even when the meaning didn't."You look beautif

They drove through the night.Kendra kept her eyes on the road. Both hands on the wheel. Celeste watched the mirror — every set of headlights catalogued, assessed, held until it turned off or passed or fell far enough back to stop mattering. Most were nothing. A truck that rode their bumper for ten miles then swung off at an interchange. A sedan that matched their speed for long enough that Celeste's hand found the gun in her waistband before it turned onto a side road and disappeared.She left her hand there for another twenty minutes."It's gone," Kendra said."I know."She moved her hand back to her lap.The mountains fell away behind them. The road flattened into valley, rose again into foothills, the dark making everything the same color. Celeste watched the mirror. She thought about forty eight hours. A man waking from a drugged sleep, reaching for the woman beside him, finding the bed empty. The safe. The garage. The gate guard remembering two women and a late run.She stopped

Nix hadn't slept.She had been awake when the phone rang. She stayed awake through the drive, Dylan's hand in hers across the center console, both of them holding on with a grip that didn't loosen once. The road signs counted down the miles; she read every one of them, felt each mile land in her chest like something being wound tighter.She kept hearing Kendra's voice on the phone. The way it had held and then hadn't. Mommy. One word and three years compressed into it, the seventeen-year-old she had lost surfacing through whatever the compound had made her into. Nix had not let herself cry on the drive. She was afraid that if she started she wouldn't be able to stop. She needed to drive. She needed to function. She needed to get to her daughter.She was afraid it wasn't real.That was the thing she couldn't say out loud, not even to Dylan, not even with his hand in hers. That Vargr had her phone. That this was something else, a trap, a cruelty she hadn't imagined yet. That they would