All Chapters of bound by deception: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

71 Chapters

don't touch me

. "Don't Touch Me"He was expecting me.I could tell the moment I pushed the office door open — the way he was sitting, chair angled slightly toward the door, no surprise on his face, no adjustment. Just that wall. That absolute unreadable wall looking back at me like he'd set a clock and I'd arrived exactly on time.I closed the door behind me.Crossed the room.Put both hands flat on his desk and leaned in until there was nothing between his face and mine but air and everything neither of us had said yet."You killed it."Not a question. Not an accusation that needed his confirmation. A fact I was placing between us like evidence on a table.He looked at me.Said nothing.That face — still, controlled, giving me absolutely zero — which was its own answer. Had always been its own answer. Daemon didn't deny things that were true. He simply didn't confirm them either, and lived in the space between like it was a country he owned."What makes you think I'm the one?"His voice came out

never letting go

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

thrilled

CHAPTER NINE — "Thrilled"I woke up angry.Not the clean kind of angry that has a clear source and a clear solution. The complicated kind — the kind that sits on your chest before your eyes are fully open and doesn't move when you try to breathe around it.His voice in the hallway.I'm not going to let you go easily.His breath on my neck. His chest against my back. His finger tracing my lips like he had the right — like five years of someone else's marriage was a detail too small to matter. I lay in the dark of my room in the pack house and stared at the ceiling and told myself I was angry.I was.I was also wet.I squeezed my eyes shut. Tried to redirect. Tried to think about the interview. The closed door. The man behind the desk and his careful face and you offended someone powerful — tried to build the anger back up to the size it needed to be to drown out everything else.His finger on my jaw.The slow trace of it.I gave up.My hand moved under the sheets before I finished deci

testing the big wolf

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

consequence

CHAPTER ELEVEN — "Consequences"He didn't come.I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling and told myself that was exactly what I wanted. The silence. The nothing. The proof that I had called his bluff and his bluff had folded and tomorrow I would go back to Derek's building and sit at my desk and the ground would finally be stable.I believed it.For about eleven minutes.Then the thing I wouldn't say out loud surfaced in the dark where I couldn't manage it — quiet and honest and completely inexcusable.I wanted him to come through that door.Not gently. Not with explanations. The door opening and those gold eyes and that jaw and the energy of a man who had decided something and was here to collect on it. I wanted the confrontation. Wanted to stand in front of whatever he brought and hold the line again and feel that specific electricity of two people who understood each other in ways that had nothing to do with sense.I fell asleep wanting it.Hating myself for wanting it.Wanting it a

addicted

CHAPTER TWELVE — "Addicted"I didn't knock.I pushed his office door open hard enough that it hit the wall behind it and I walked in and I didn't care about the assistant who called after me or the sound it made or any of it. I crossed the room and put myself in front of his desk and looked at him directly."You did this."Not a question. A statement laid flat on the desk between us like evidence he couldn't close a file on.He looked up from whatever he was reading.Said nothing.That face. That absolute wall. Looking back at me like I was a weather event he was observing from a safe distance — interested, maybe. Unbothered, completely."Derek didn't do anything to you." My voice was shaking and I hated that it was shaking but I couldn't stop it — the fury and the guilt and Derek's face in that hotel room all running together into something I didn't have a clean container for. "He worked his entire life for that company. Everything he built — you made one call and you took it. Just l

watch your back

CHAPTER THIRTEEN — "Watch Your Back"I left without a word.The door took care of the word for me — I pulled it behind me with everything I had and the sound of it cracked through the hallway like a gunshot and I walked away from it before the echo died.My room. My bed. My phone.I sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled up the news and there he was — Derek's face on the screen, caught outside the hotel, jaw tight, eyes carrying the specific weight of a man holding something together through sheer force of will. The banner still running underneath. Board members. Pulling out. The company he'd built bleeding out in real time on a Tuesday morning because I had sat at a desk and sent a file.I watched for thirty seconds.Then called him.He picked up on the first ring."Ira." His voice steadier than I expected. Careful."I'm resigning, Derek."Silence.Then — "Why." Quiet. "You too? I just lost half my board and now—""Listen to me." I kept my voice level. "You have all my support. A

two can play

CHAPTER FOURTEEN — "Two Can Play"I didn't sleep.Sat in the dark with my back against the headboard and both hands pressed to my throat feeling my own pulse until the sky outside went gray and the birds started and the house began its slow morning sounds and I was still sitting there.Someone else will handle that.I turned the words over until they had no more edges to find. Until I knew the shape of them completely — what they meant, what they didn't mean, what Isabella was and wasn't capable of.I already knew what she was capable of.I had the bruising to prove it.She wanted me gone. Scared. Running with my tail down and my head low and my presence removed from her house and her husband and her carefully constructed life.I sat with that.Then I got up.Went to my closet.And picked the white turtleneck. High collar. Every mark covered. Then the skirt — the one I'd bought and never worn, the one that had been sitting in plastic because it was the kind of thing you saved for a mo

caught

CHAPTER FIFTEEN — "Caught"I got in the car.Didn't speak.He didn't either.His hands were on the steering wheel and I could see it from where I sat — the grip, white-knuckled, the specific tension of someone holding something in that wanted very badly to come out. His jaw tight. Eyes forward. The car moving through the city in complete silence while the morning went on outside the windows like nothing had happened at a breakfast table twenty minutes ago.I looked at my hands in my lap.Thought about scorpions.Thought about silver-laced snakes.Thought about the completely calm face of my twin sister describing the method of my death over breakfast napkins.I said nothing.He said nothing.We drove.The building was everything the pack house wasn't.Glass and steel and the specific energy of a place built entirely around one man's standards — which meant every surface was deliberate, every detail chosen, the kind of environment that communicated power without trying because trying w

warning

CHAPTER SIXTEEN — "Warning"Nobody moved first.Isabella in the doorway. White dress. Handbag. That smile — three layers deep and none of them warm. Daemon still close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, the city spread out behind us through the floor-to-ceiling glass like it had been arranged as a backdrop for exactly this moment.Then Daemon stepped back.One step. Controlled. The wall going up so fast it was almost architectural — one second all heat and hands and certainty, the next a man standing in the middle of his office with his jacket straight and his face doing absolutely nothing.Almost convincing.Except his jaw. The specific tightness of it. The cost of the control visible in exactly one place if you knew where to look.I knew where to look.Isabella crossed the room.Not fast. Not with the energy of a woman who had just walked in on something. Slow and easy, heels quiet on the floor, the specific movement of someone who had decided in the doorway how this

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