Alle Kapitel von SAVED BY MY BROTHERS : Kapitel 161 – Kapitel 170

She was sitting on his bed wearing his shirt her own was still damp from the fountain and looking around his room with the unhurried ease of someone who has been in a place enough times to stop noticing it and start simply existing in it.“That was so risky,” she said.“So what.” Zane dropped into his chair. “You needed it. Your life is genuinely boring, Mauli. You’re welcome for entering it.”She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Thank you so much.”“Since you’re here anyway—” he nodded toward her bag, “—we could study.”She looked at him. “I am not in the mood to study.”“You said earlier you didn’t enjoy today at all.”“A little,” she admitted. “Maybe a little.”“Then enjoy it fully. You’re allowed.” He stood, stretched, and moved toward the closet. “You take life too seriously.”“Says the person who—” She stopped.He had pulled something out of the closet.A guitar. Not just any guitar — she recognised it immediately, the way you recognise something you have wanted for long enough that i

It’s fine,” Ethan said.He produced a smile that was doing its best under the circumstances. “I’m working with someone’s girlfriend. I should expect this kind of thing.”Lilly said nothing.She heard what was underneath the words — the careful, controlled quality of someone managing something they hadn’t planned to feel. She filed it away quietly and sat down and opened the sheet music and said nothing at all, because sometimes the most useful thing you can do is let a silence do its work.He began to play.The piano filled the room — warm and precise, the chord progression they had built together moving through its paces — and Lilly followed it in, her voice finding the melody without effort.Ethan’s hands slowed slightly on the keys.He looked at her.She kept singing, eyes on the sheet, but she was aware of his attention the way you’re aware of light changing in a room.“You have an incredible voice,” he said, when she finished the first run-through.She tried not to react to that

“Where did you even find this footage?” Lilly looked at her phone, at the clip of Rue moving through the music room with the careful deliberateness of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.Zane leaned against the wall. “The day you were doing your final practice with Ethan. I’d come to find you — you weren’t picking up my calls — so I came to the building. That’s when I saw her in the corridor near your classroom, moving around in a way that didn’t sit right with me.” He paused. “After you and Ethan left I watched her go in and start going through your things. Disorganising everything. I started recording and was about to go in and stop her but your teacher walked in from the other end — if I’d moved I would have looked like the one who’d been in there.” He looked at Lilly steadily. “I tried calling you after. You didn’t pick. I tried again in the morning but coach pulled me into practice. That’s why I came with the guitar — I was trying to reach you and couldn’t, so I came my

She had not planned to become this.Not the charity organizations spanning four continents, not the second richest person in the world, not the woman whose name appeared in headlines before she had finished her morning coffee. She had planned, once, something considerably simpler — a company, a family, a life that belonged to her. But life had taken her through a series of rooms she hadn’t chosen, and in each one she had made the best decision available, and somehow the accumulation of those decisions had brought her here.Here being a hotel suite abroad, a contract that kept her in one country for three years, and a project that would change the water access of approximately four million people.Lilly had refused to come with her.She had asked. She had explained. She had shown her the project, the scope of it, what it would mean for people who had nothing. Lilly had listened politely and said, just as politely, that she wanted to stay. That she wanted university. That she wanted her

Lilly stepped out of the gate the next morning, already running through her plans for the day, and walked directly into someone she had no interest in seeing.Rue.She froze.Of course she lives near here, Lilly thought.Rue’s expression shifted from surprise into something far more satisfied. “Look who I found.” She tilted her head. “Done sleeping with the same man for money?”“What makes you think you can speak to me like that?” Lilly said, her voice steady but with an edge under it. “With that much confidence?”“Because you’re walking out of a house that isn’t yours.”“What makes you think this house isn’t mine? Or that it belongs to a man?” Lilly’s eyes narrowed. “Who do you think it belongs to?”“It belongs to her mother,” Maya said, appearing in the doorway behind Lilly, “who happens to love her very much.”Lilly hadn’t expected her to step in — hadn’t expected, again, that easy claim of mother — but there it was, delivered with complete composure.Maya looked at Rue steadily. “