All Chapters of When Forbidden Feels This Good: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Scarlett’s POVI had settled on a sundress, simple and yellow, the kind of thing that required no explanation and offered none, paired with sandals and my hair down, still slightly damp at the ends from the shower. I looked like someone going for a walk. I looked like someone who had not thought too carefully about this.I had thought too carefully about this.Ezra was already there.He was leaning against one of the lobby pillars with the specific quality of ease that some people carried in their bodies naturally, not performing relaxation but actually comfortable with existing in a space, the posture of someone who had arrived and was content to wait without requiring the waiting to be anything other than what it was. He was looking at his phone, not with the anxious scrolling of someone filling time, just reading something with mild interest, and when he heard the elevator, he looked up.His face did the thing.Not elaborate. Not performed. Just a simple, genuine shift, the express

Scarlett’s POVCade, in a normal state of feeling, was already a significant presence in any room. Cade, with his jaw set and his eyes dark and the particular stillness of a man who has been waiting long enough that the waiting has converted itself into something considerably less patient, was something else entirely.He looked at me the way he looked at things that had caused him genuine concern, with that complete, consuming focus that left no room for anything peripheral. And underneath the concern, visible to anyone who knew how to read him, which I did, entirely and against my better interests, was something that had nothing to do with concern and everything to do with the elevator I had just stepped out of and the two hours I had spent not in this hotel room."Not now, please," I said, moving past him toward the door. "I need to shower and rest. I had a fun afternoon."He turned to follow me."Fun afternoon," he said. He said it the way he repeated things when he was working to

Cade’s POVThe message notification sat on her screen like a small, deliberate provocation.Scarlett looked at it and looked away, which told me everything I needed to know about whether she had already read the preview on the lock screen, which she had, and whether she intended to make this easy for me, which she did not."Go on," I said. "Check your message.""No." She kept her eyes deliberately elsewhere, performing disinterest with the specific quality of someone very interested. "I'll check it when I want to.""I insist.""And I said no." She turned to look at me then, the fire in her eyes the particular fire of someone who has decided on a position and is not entertaining a review of it.I looked at her for exactly one second.Then I reached past her arm and took the phone from her back pocket."Cade." She grabbed for it immediately, both hands, quick and serious. "Give it back."I raised my arm.She jumped, fingers closing on air, approximately four inches below the phone."You

Cade’s POVWe were close.Twenty feet from the service elevator, maybe less, the corridor was empty ahead of us, Russo's men waiting at the rear exit four floors below, the whole thing almost clean, almost contained, almost the version of this situation where everyone got out, and the consequences were manageable.Almost.I heard her phone hit the floor before I registered that she had dropped it, the specific hard crack of a device meeting concrete, and I turned in time to see Scarlett bend down to retrieve it with the instinct of someone whose phone contained things that mattered, that contained her mother's voice notes and her scan images and my note photographed and saved and all the small irreplaceable evidence of a life being lived.The bend took her below my eyeline for half a second.Half a second was enough.Biggy came out of the stairwell door to our left with the efficiency of someone who had been positioned there deliberately, who had known the service corridor was the exi

Cade’s POVThe blindfold was on before the bus had fully stopped.Rough fabric, the kind that had been used before, smelling of something chemical and dark, pressed against my eyes and was secured at the back of my head with the practised efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that it had become a procedure rather than an event. I did not flinch. Did not move. Let it happen with the stillness of someone who had made a calculation and arrived at compliance as its only viable output.Because they had Scarlett.That was the calculation. That was the only number that mattered in the equation. Everything else, the blindfold, the bus, and the gun that had been pressing against my abdomen with increasing emphasis since we left the hotel corridor, all of it was secondary to the single fact that somewhere behind me in a Houston service corridor, Scarlett was standing with the fragile assurance of Biggy's word between her and whatever came next.The darkness behind the blindfold w