All Chapters of bound by deception: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT — "MISMATCH"Daemon's POVThe club was the kind of place that didn't advertise.No sign above the door. No velvet rope visible from the street. You knew about it because someone who mattered had told you, and if no one who mattered had told you, then it didn't exist. Low ceilings, dark wood, leather worn soft from decades of men who came here specifically to be left alone. Candlelight that moved but never quite reached the corners. The kind of silence that had been purchased and maintained like any other luxury — quietly, expensively, without drawing attention to the effort.A girl moved on the low stage at the back of the room.Not performing for anyone in particular. Just moving the way expensive things move when they know they're being watched — slow, unhurried, with the confidence of something that has never had to ask for attention. The man beside her had one hand at her waist, loose, proprietary, not quite holding on. Lucien's hand. His eyes were somewhere e

CHAPTER FORTY — "FOUND"Irabella's POVI woke up tangled in him.His arm still locked across my waist. His chest solid and warm against my back. The room still mostly dark, that specific grey-blue quality of early morning that hadn't decided yet whether to become day. Neither of us had moved in the night. His body curved around mine like it had always known the shape of it, like sleep had stripped away every complication and left something simpler underneath.Something that felt like the most honest thing in this house.I kept my eyes closed.Let myself have the moment before the moment ended.His breathing changed first. A subtle shift — the rhythm of sleep giving way to wakefulness, the quality of his stillness becoming something more deliberate, more present. His attention sharpened before his body moved at all, and I felt it the way you felt weather changing, something in the air announcing itself before anything visible happened.He was watching me.I could feel it. The specific

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO — "VERIFICATION"Daemon's POVThe pack doctor's office smelled like antiseptic and old paper.Daemon had been here twice in twenty years. Once when he was nineteen and had taken a silver blade to the shoulder in a border dispute that he'd won and not told his father about. Once the night his first Beta died, when the grief had expressed itself physically in the way pack bonds sometimes did — as something that had to be verified and not just felt.He hadn't been here since.He set the bottle on the desk without sitting down. Without preamble. Just placed it in the center of the desk lamp's light and stepped back and watched Dr. Whitmore's face.The doctor looked at it.At him.Back at the bottle — his hand reaching for it slowly, the careful, unhurried movement of a man approaching something he already recognized and was taking his time confirming. He turned it once under the light. The liquid inside caught the glow and held it.His expression changed.Not dramaticall

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR — "TRUMP CARD"Isabella's POVThe smirk came before the phone was fully down.I felt it arrive — slow, satisfied, the kind that didn't perform for anyone because there was no one in the room to perform for. Just me, and the phone, and the specific warmth of a plan clicking into its final position."Daemon, baby."I said it to the empty room. To the ceiling. To the photo still faintly glowing on my screen — his face, composed and certain, the face he wore in every room and had worn beside mine on the day I had made him mine."You're mine." My voice came out low and absolute. "Only mine." I looked at the photo for one more second. "I won't let anyone take you from me. Not even fate itself."I hummed.A small sound. Private. The specific contentment of a woman who had spent twenty-six years learning that the only thing standing between her and what she wanted was the willingness to reach for it.I started counting.Five.My thumb moved to the recording app. Opened it.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX — "NEVER YOUR DAUGHTER"Irabella's POVDaemon walked out first.The door closed behind him and the room changed immediately — the air shifting, the last buffer between me and my parents gone, the specific quality of a space that had just lost the only person in it with the power to make anyone behave.My mother's hand closed around my arm before the click of the latch had finished.Hard. Immediate. The grip that didn't ask, that had never once in twenty-six years asked — that simply took, because taking had always been the language she used with me and she saw no reason to learn another."Did you tell him."Not a question. An accusation wearing the shape of one, her voice low and furious, the fury of a woman who had already decided on the verdict and was simply going through the procedural motion of asking."You ungrateful child." Her grip tightened. I felt the bones of my arm compress and said nothing. "How could you do this to your sister. After everything we've —