All Chapters of bound by deception: Chapter 21 - Chapter 24

CHAPTER EIGHT — "Never Letting Go"The office was quiet.Daemon stood exactly where she'd left him — facing the door, the air still carrying the shape of everything that had just happened in it. Her words. Her finger between them. The way she'd held his gaze without flinching and then turned and walked out like she was the one with all the power.She was.That was the part he hadn't accounted for.He moved to the desk. Slowly. Sat in the chair and looked at the surface of it — the wood grain, the files he hadn't touched, the pen sitting at the exact angle he'd left it this morning before the day had become whatever this day had become.His eyes moved to the spot.Where her hands had been. Both palms flat against the wood, her weight behind them, leaning into him with that cold fury that was somehow more dangerous than heat. He could still see the faint impression of it — or maybe he was constructing it, the mind filling in what it wanted to find.He reached out.Slow. Without deciding

CHAPTER TEN — "Testing The Wolf"Call it selfish.Call it exactly what it was — a woman who had been cornered in a hallway, threatened, almost kissed, and left standing there with her pulse in her throat and something that felt dangerously close to excitement where fear was supposed to be.I sent the file anyway.Derek's confirmation came back in forty minutes. I read it once. Set my phone down. Picked it back up.Gold eyes. Tight jaw. His breath on my neck.Think carefully, Ira.I thought carefully.Hit confirm.His office had been a war zone since six AM.Not visibly — nothing was overturned, nothing was broken. The files were open, the desk was ordered, everything exactly where it belonged. But the energy inside that room had weight to it. The kind that pressed against the walls and seeped under the door and reached his staff before they reached him.His first assistant knocked at seven. No answer. Knocked again at seven forty. Nothing. By eight she was communicating exclusively th