Accueil / Romance / I Faked My Death to Destroy My Husband / Chapitre 271 - Chapitre 280

Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 271 - Chapitre 280

322

The dance

Romeo Irene burst into laughter so suddenly and brightly that several people nearby turned to look at us. “Romeo.” she said between laughs, “That is shockingly petty for a man of science.” “I am observing objective data.” “You are jealous.” “I am not jealous.” “You absolutely are.” “Irene,” I said evenly, “the man paired a navy blazer with black shoes. I am experiencing a completely rational response to a preventable offense.” Her eyes danced. God help me, they danced. “Well…” she said lightly, “the fashion criminal is currently trapped behind a bachelorette party at the bar, and this song is excellent.” Before I could respond, she stood abruptly and leaned over the table toward me. The neckline of her dress shifted dangerously. Every coherent thought in my brain immediately ceased functioning. “Come on,” she said. Alarm bells detonated across my nervous system. “Come on where?” “Dance with me.” “Irene,” I began carefully, “I can’t…” “Oh my God,” she i

Heat

Irene I was going to let him do it.I was entirely ready to let the fire consume the whole goddamn house.His face hovered inches from mine, close enough that I could feel the uneven hitch of his breathing against my skin. Close enough that the world beyond him faded into static.His eyes were dark. There was nothing cold left in them now. Nothing carefully controlled. What remained was raw enough to terrify me.My hands tightened in the lapels of his shirt, gripping the expensive black fabric like it was the only thing keeping me upright. My pulse was pounding so violently I could feel it behind my eyes.I tilted my chin upward and closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable catastrophe of Romeo Galante kissing me.His hand shifted against my waist before slowly sliding upward, spanning the side of my throat and settling against my jaw. Warm fingers threaded into the hair at the nape of my neck, holding me with terrifying gentleness. Then his thumb moved, pressing against the cent

I am looking

RomeoThe clock on my office wall read 2:45 AM.I had spent the last three hours in Delivery Room Four managing a complicated twin birth. Both babies were stable now, transferred safely to the neonatal intensive care unit, and their mother was finally resting after nearly twelve hours of labor and surgical intervention.My scrubs were damp with sweat. My shoulders ached from tension and exhaustion, and my brain felt like it was operating several seconds behind the rest of my body.All I wanted was black coffee and silence.But when I returned to the Galante estate, I did not go to the kitchen or upstairs to sleep.Instead, I walked toward the secure basement level, drawn by an entirely different kind of responsibility.The steel door to the operations room slid open.The room beyond was dark except for the glow of monitors spread across an entire wall. Live camera feeds flickered beside encrypted code streams and thermal maps tracking our properties across Europe. Blue and green light

Standing too close

IreneThe hum of the servers should have grounded me.It didn’t.Not with him that close.Romeo was still there… too close now for the boundary to mean anything except habit. Three feet used to feel like control. Like something I had designed and could rely on.But tonight it felt like a lie we were both politely maintaining.I could feel him before I looked at him properly. The shift in the air when he stopped pretending he would step back. The stillness in his posture that wasn’t exhaustion anymore. It was restraint.Like something in him had reached its limit and simply refused to move further away.My fingers stayed on the keyboard out of reflex.Nothing on the screens mattered.The intrusion had already been handled. The systems were stable. The world outside this room could have burned down and I would not have noticed, because all my processing capacity had narrowed into one inescapable variable: Romeo Galante standing too close to me at 3 in the morning and he had said. “I am

Heat

Romeo The human body can survive approximately three days without water, three weeks without food, and eleven days without sleep. I was currently testing the limits of the third variable. Following the incident in the room in the basement, my resting heart rate had forgotten its baseline. Sleep was a mathematical impossibility. Every time I closed my eyes, my brain helpfully replayed the exact closeness of Irene’s mouth, the scent of vanilla on her skin and the devastating realization that she wanted me to cross the line just as badly as I wanted to cross it. By 4:00 AM, I surrendered. I left my bedroom and took the private elevator down to the estate’s indoor lap pool. Swimming in cold water lowers the core body temperature, triggers the mammalian dive reflex and forces the parasympathetic nervous system to slow the heart rate. It was a purely clinical solution to a physiological problem. At least, that was the lie I told myself while stepping into the elevator half-dressed

Engaged

Irene “You have been staring at the same string of encrypted code for exactly fourteen minutes, Irene.” I blinked hard, snapping out of my thoughts. Isabella was sitting on the modern leather sofa across the server room, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, surrounded by an intimidating mountain of legal portfolios and a half-empty espresso cup balanced on the armrest. She occasionally liked to work down here when the chaos of Dante and Elara upstairs became too loud for contract negotiations. “I am running a manual diagnostic.” I lied smoothly, tapping a few random keys to make the monitor scroll. “Checking for residual malware from the Milan breach.” Isabella slowly lowered her reading glasses and peered at me over the frames. The look that suggested she could see directly through skin, bone, and lies without requiring imaging equipment. “Right.” Isabella said slowly. “A manual diagnostic.” Her gaze narrowed slightly. “Does this diagnostic also involve you occasionally f

Failed

RomeoMay 27th.Every year, my body remembered the date before my mind did.It always started the same way.A dull ache in the center of my chest. Tight breathing. Numb fingers. A pulse beating too hard against my ribs.The symptoms were accurate enough to be insulting.It looked like a heart attack.It wasn’t.I was sitting alone in my office at the clinic, staring at the wall while the hospital kept moving around me.Phones rang somewhere down the hall. Nurses hurried between stations. Overhead pages echoed through the corridors.A newborn cried nearby before exhausted parents quickly soothed it.Life continued.But inside my office, everything felt silent.Six years.Two thousand, one hundred and ninety-one days since my entire life collapsed.I pressed the heel of my hand against my chest, trying to steady my breathing.It didn’t work.My thoughts were a mess.I kept seeing Camilla.Her smile.The warm golden light in her drafting studio late at night. The future we used to talk

I am out

IreneMy heart felt completely cold. Not suddenly. It was a slow, freezing realization that settled deep into my bones as I stared at the dates on the monitor.May 27th. Six years today.I shut down the secure terminal, the blue light fading from my face and leaving me in the dim gray shadows of the basement.I didn’t cry. I didn’t smash the keyboard. I just sat there while the pieces of the last five years finally locked into place with terrifying clarity.I was an architect. Now I was a security expert. I built fortresses, monitored entry points, and calculated structural failures.And looking at the data, my place in Romeo Galante’s life was one massive calculation error.I had spent half a decade thinking he was broken. But he wasn’t broken. He was occupied.I couldn’t let myself get trapped in this anymore. I couldn’t keep drowning in his orbit.Because Camilla wasn’t dead. She wasn’t a memory buried safely in the past. She was a living being that still held the keys to his soul

Fever

IreneI dropped the Beretta onto the floorboards.Metal hit wood with a sharp clatter, loud enough to feel like it should have meant something. But Romeo didn’t react at all.Not a blink. Not a shift. Nothing.I scrambled across the remaining distance on my knees until I was right in front of him.“Romeo.” I breathed. My hands hovered in the air, unsure where to land. “Romeo, look at me.”Still nothing.His eyes were open but they weren’t seeing anything. Fixed. Empty. Like whatever had been inside him had stepped out and left the body behind.My throat tightened.“Okay…” I whispered to myself, forcing control back into my voice. “Okay. Check first.”I reached forward and pressed two fingers to the side of his neck.The moment I touched him, I froze.Heat.Not normal warmth. Not fever warmth. Something far worse. He was burning.It felt like touching the hood of a car that had been running at full speed for hours without stopping. Like his body had been pushed past every safe limit a

Like this hurt him too

Irene The violent trembling in his chest didn’t stop for a long time. I stayed exactly where I was, pinned against the edge of the sofa, letting Romeo hold onto me like a man trying to survive a shipwreck. My fingers were still wrapped around the damp cloth I had used on his face, suspended awkwardly in the air long after it had stopped serving any purpose. Eventually, slowly, I lowered it back into the ceramic bowl on the table beside us. The faint sound of water rippling through the silence felt strangely loud. Carefully, deliberately, I let my hands settle on his shoulders. His skin was still burning beneath the ruined fabric of his shirt. Heat radiated through the material in heavy waves but as the minutes dragged on, the desperate tension locked inside his body slowly began to unravel. The panic eased first. Then the rigid brace in his spine. Then the unbearable force in his grip. They were weakening. The instinct that had driven him to pull me into his space d

Dernier

...

...

Suivant

Scanner le code pour lire sur l'application

DMCA.com Protection Status