บททั้งหมดของ The War Between Us: บทที่ 101 - บทที่ 110

Milena DragovicI lowered the phone and let the cool air of the kitchen settle around me. My hands shook, just a little, so I braced myself against the island, the marble cold against my palms.Alexander was still there, still motionless. I could feel his attention like a physical weight. He didn’t say anything, not yet, but the expectation was there: it was my move.I closed my eyes for a moment, tried to slow my breathing, but it was pointless. The adrenaline was already burned into my blood.“So,” he said, as if he’d been waiting for the cue in a script. “That sounded promising.”I stared at him. Not because I didn’t understand the sarcasm but because, in that moment, I was trying to parse the exact percentage of him that was joking. Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes he wore his irony so openly it was a kind of armor. Other times, like now, I could feel the truth underneath, the slow roll of it, like the threat conducted through a live wire.Alexander glanced at me, his mouth set in

Alexander Li ChenThe next morning I woke early, trained by years of wariness to surface before dawn.I padded through the empty house, the floor cool beneath my feet, every sense already cataloguing the environment. The security panel blinked green. No alerts. No breached sensors. No movement on the outer cameras except wind moving through the trees.Still, silence can be staged.I made coffee and leaned against the counter while it brewed.I checked my phone.No texts. No missed calls. Not from my father, not from the family’s lawyer, not even a courtesy update from Rayven. The digital silence was, in its own way, deafening. In this business, absence was never an accident. I opened my laptop, logged in to the house’s security feeds, and began a methodical scan.An hour passed before I heard the soft slide of feet in the hall. Milena emerged, fully dressed, hair pulled back in a sleek knot, face scrubbed of anything that could be called vulnerability. She wore black from collar to cu

Milena DragovicMy father had always known how to make silence feel like a weapon.The moment he finished speaking, the room went perfectly still.Not the polite quiet of an expensive restaurant. Not the muffled calm of a private dining room. This was something else entirely. A kind of vacuum that swallowed sound and forced every word to carry more weight than it should.He finally spoke, and though his voice was measured, every syllable seemed to echo. “I am told you have something they want.”I didn’t answer him.Not immediately.Across the table, my father watched with the patient curiosity of a man observing an experiment he had already predicted the outcome of. His expression didn’t change. His posture didn’t shift. If someone had photographed the moment, it would have looked like a perfectly normal family lunch.But I knew him.This was the part where he waited.Beside me, Alexander hadn’t moved. I could feel the quiet heat of his attention without looking at him, the way a stor

Milena DragovicMy father’s smile lingered for a moment after Alexander spoke, as if it were an afterimage of some private joke he’d already played on us. But it wasn’t approval, not even the satisfaction of a well-played hand; it was assessment, and it sharpened the air between us. He leaned back in his chair, not a casual gesture but a deliberate recalibration, the way a diver draws breath before plunging into unknown depths.“Prepared,” he repeated softly. The word hung in the air, as heavy and delicate as spun glass. I waited for him to shatter it.He looked from Alexander to me, his gaze flicking but not lingering, as if he was reading progress notes only he could see.Then he looked from Alexander to me, weighing something I couldn’t see.“Good,” he said at last, the word a placeholder that meant nothing and everything.Alexander didn’t react.He simply waited.My father turned his glass slightly on the table, watching the light refract through the water.“Gabriel,” he said afte

Milena Dragovic The instant the first attacker’s shoulder appeared at the edge of the pillar, Alexander was already on his feet, arm extended, pistol leveled in a straight line from his heart to the threat. “Alexander!” I screamed. Two quick shots cracked from the pistol in his hand. Precise. Controlled. The first bullet took the man in the neck. The second finished him before he could finish falling. I just froze and watched, because that’s what I’d been trained to do. Watch, observe, remember. The other two men scattered between the rows of parked cars. Alexander moved with them, reading their strategy in real time, using each car’s mass and door as both cover and trap. The next exchange of gunfire was a blur of ricochets and shattered windows. He never wasted a shot. Each time he fired, it was to end a possibility, not simply to scare. He grabbed the door of the nearest SUV and slammed it shut, using the metal frame as cover while he advanced. The second man fi