All Chapters of Love Me Then Destroy Me: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Elias's POVThe call came in while I was still staring at the recording device on my desk as though it were something that could detonate.Adrian Hale.His name pulsed across my screen with quiet authority. He did not text. He did not leave messages. He called, which told me something about how he measured the gravity of situations - the phone as a statement of seriousness, of expecting to be received.I let it ring twice. Three times. I wanted the space between us to remain measured. I wanted him to sit inside the uncertainty of whether I would answer at all.On the fourth ring, I let it fall into stillness.I did not decline it. I simply stopped it - which was a different thing - and turned back to the woman sitting across from me at the desk.Her name was Maris Vale. She had once been Director of Creative Operations at Hale Literary Holdings. On paper she had resigned for personal growth. In the way that certain departures look identical on the surface and mean entirely opposite th

Adrian's POVI was not anxious when Elias refused me.What I felt was clarity - which was different, and in some ways considerably worse. Panic is loud. It floods the bloodstream and demands immediate reaction. Clarity is quieter. It strips away every comfortable illusion and leaves only the bare shape of consequence.As I stepped into the private elevator of my building, the understanding that settled over me was precise enough to be unsettling in a way that anger never managed to be.The story no longer belonged to one journalist. It no longer sat within a single narrative that could be shaped or negotiated or provided with sufficient context to soften its edges. It had fractured outward into something with too many moving parts for any one person to manage - including me.The elevator doors closed with a muted seal. My reflection in the mirrored walls looked entirely unchanged - tie straight, posture measured, face carrying the same controlled neutrality I had worn in difficult roo

Elias's POV"If this hurts me, will you stop?"Lana's voice did not rise when she asked it. It did not tremble either. She spoke the way someone speaks when they are negotiating something important and have decided in advance not to let their feelings show in their face - calm, steady, entirely controlled. That composure unsettled me more than anger would have, because anger gives you something to push back against and this gave me nothing except the full weight of the question.We were standing in her living room. Late afternoon light pressed softly through the tall windows, diffused by pale curtains that shifted slightly with the current from the air conditioning. The space looked intentional - curated, serene, put together by someone who had learned to make a home entirely on their own terms. It did not look like the kind of room where difficult things happened. And yet every word we had exchanged since I walked through the door had felt like a careful advance or a careful retreat,

Lana's POV"Did you see this?"Mara's voice was low and careful, the way voices get when they are delivering something significant and are not entirely sure how the person receiving it is going to respond. She slid into the chair across from me and placed her phone on the table between us, the screen still lit, the essay filling it from edge to edge. The café smelled faintly of roasted coffee and old paper - comfortable smells, ordinary smells, the smells of a place that had nothing to do with any of this."I saw it," I said.My voice came out steadier than I expected. My chest, however, was doing something else entirely - a thumping, irregular rhythm that I could not quite bring under control, as though my body understood the weight of what had happened before my mind had fully caught up with it. I looked at the screen. My own words looked back at me - the sentences I had spent weeks shaping and reshaping, the phrases I had agonized over in the small hours of the morning, the paragraphs

Elias's POV"You need to move faster," the editor said. "This story is going to break whether you publish it or someone else does. The only question is whether your version goes first."Elias had his phone pressed between his ear and his shoulder, both hands flat on the desk in front of him, looking at the draft that had been open on his laptop for the past three hours. The apartment was quiet in the way apartments are quiet late at night when the city outside has settled into its lowest register - not silent, but continuous, the hum of a place still running. The desk was covered in the organized evidence of months of work: printed interview transcripts, financial records annotated in his own handwriting, cross-reference charts, correspondence he had printed because some documents needed to be read on paper rather than screen."I am not publishing on a deadline that someone else set," he said."Elias-""I will publish when I am certain," he said. "Not before.""You are already certain