Todos los capítulos de His Tamed Wife, The Wild Heiress: Capítulo 211 - Capítulo 220

Chapter 212KIERANThe video was everywhere by the time I woke up.I hadn't meant to sleep — I'd told myself I was just resting my eyes on the sofa while Theo finally settled around three in the morning, and then the light through the window had gone from black to grey to the flat white of mid-morning, and Penny was standing over me with her phone already extended, her expression somewhere between exhausted and grimly amused."You need to see this," she said.I sat up too fast. My ribs objected. I took the phone anyway.The footage was shaky, shot from an angle that suggested someone had been standing two aisles over and had the presence of mind to start recording the moment things escalated rather than the moment they'd started — which meant I was watching the tail end of something, Isla Vance's hand already locked around Adria's arm, her voice raised, sharp, accusatory, cut off completely three seconds in by a second figure enterin

Chapter 214DAMIENThey took the light first.Not all at once — that would have been too obvious, too easy to resist against. They dimmed it in stages over what I guessed was two days, though guessing was already becoming difficult, because the other thing they'd taken was time itself, or at least any reliable way of measuring it. No windows. No clock. Meals that arrived on no discernible schedule, sometimes twice in what felt like a single stretch of waking, sometimes not at all for what felt like a full day, so that hunger stopped being a clock and became just another sensation with no relationship to anything outside itself.By the time the room went fully dark, I had already lost the thread of how long I'd been in it.They'd moved me at some point — I remembered that much, hands under my arms, a corridor, another room, this one smaller, no chair, just a mat on the floor and four walls that gave back no sound when I spoke into them, which meant they'd been treated for it, acoustic

Chapter 216DARRENI had done this before.That was the part I didn't say out loud to anyone, not to Valentina, not to the council, not even to myself in the specific unguarded hours when I let myself think clearly about what I actually was. I had walked into other people's collapsing lives the way I'd walked into that sitting room a week ago, and I had watched them break apart in real time, and I had felt — nothing. Interest, sometimes. A kind of clinical curiosity, the way you might watch an insect struggle against something sticky, waiting to see exactly how long it took before it stopped fighting.I had done that to three people that I could count without effort. Maybe more, if I let myself count the ones I'd only assisted with rather than led. I had toyed with lives the way other people toyed with a puzzle, and when I'd gotten what I wanted out of them — information, access, the specific satisfaction of watching someone's architecture come apart — I had left, and felt nothing on

Chapter 218DAMIENThe door opened at some point. I didn't hear footsteps beforehand — I never did anymore, the acoustic treatment on the walls swallowing everything until the door itself became the only warning I ever got.A technician. Not one of the three voices — a different presence entirely, someone who came in physically sometimes to check something, adjust a line, note a reading on a small device he carried and never showed me.He didn't speak to me directly most times. This time he did."You're fighting the compound," he said. Conversational. The tone of a man discussing weather, or traffic, something with no weight to it at all. "Most subjects stop resisting by now. You're an outlier."I said nothing."It's not going to matter," he said, still adjusting something at my arm, not looking at my face. "This is just the preparation phase. Softening the foundation." He straightened up, finally glanced at me, and there was nothing cruel in his expression, which was somehow worse th

Chapter 220DARRENI thought about Kieran.I'd spent the last week hating him, or telling myself I hated him, some old grievance surfacing every time I looked at his face that I still hadn't fully reconstructed, sixteen years old in a warehouse, a pipe in my hand, Damien watching and doing nothing. I didn't understand that memory yet, didn't understand why it lived in me the way it did, sharp and specific and utterly divorced from the fifteen years of Kieran's life I actually had documentation for.But I understood, sitting in that dim room with the council's phrase still ringing in my ears, that whatever I'd done to Kieran — whatever role I'd played in whatever had happened to him in that warehouse — I was about to watch it happen again. To Damien this time. My own cousin. The man who'd delivered a baby on a road with his own two hands a week and a half ago, who'd turned a car around, who'd threatened a journalist with real and specific violence over a woman he wasn't even supposed t