Alle Kapitel von Veiled Deception: Kapitel 11 – Kapitel 20

Damien's POVI watched her from the hallway, unseen. She didn’t know, of course. That was the point.Her hair was a tangled halo around her head, her hands gripping the blanket like a lifeline. I had anticipated she’d move fast, or try. But not like this. Not methodically, memorising the cameras, the creaks of the floor, like some tiny predator in a forest too vast for her.A smirk tugged at my lips. She thought she had control. She thought she could plan her little rebellion. That needs to be free—it’s intoxicating. Dangerous. But it made her… honest. Pure.I sipped my coffee, letting the bitter warmth spread through me. I didn’t rush in. Not yet. She needed to feel the walls, the locks, the space. She needed to think she could outrun me.She’ll thank me later. Maybe.She peeked around the corner, careful, quick. My presence made her pulse spike; I could see it in the twitch of her shoulders, the slight hitch in her breath when she realised I wasn’t gone. My attention was gentle, but

The morning came too slowly.I woke groggy, my head heavy, eyes stinging from the light bleeding through the cream curtains. My throat felt dry, as though I’d swallowed sand in my sleep. For one weightless moment, my mind was blank—no thoughts, no memories, only the ache of existing.Then it hit me.The sound.The whispers.That door.The memory flooded back like ice water down my spine. My chest tightened. I sat up too fast, the room spinning in pale yellow light. My heart thudded so loud it felt like the only real thing in the world.I clutched the blanket to my chest, as if the thin fabric could protect me from what I’d heard. It hadn’t been a dream—I knew that much. Dreams didn’t leave dread like this, coiled in your blood and refusing to leave.My eyes fell on the tray at the foot of my bed. Breakfast again. But this time, there was something else—a folded sheet of cream-colored paper, my name written neatly across the top in Damien’s precise hand.D-A-M-I-E-N.His name echoed in

The word engaged still burned my throat.It echoed off the walls long after it left my mouth, bouncing through the sitting room like something alive. Damien didn’t flinch. He didn’t rush to defend himself or soften the blow. He simply straightened from the fireplace, dusting his hands together slowly, deliberately — like this was an interruption, not an accusation.“You shouldn’t shout,” he said calmly. “You’ll hurt your head.”I stared at him, chest heaving, hands clenched so tightly my nails bit into my palms. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to move, to run, to do something — but my feet stayed planted, heavy as stone.“You don’t get to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do,” I snapped. “Not after this.”My gaze flicked to the crumpled letter at his feet. Proof. Confirmation. A trap with my name signed somewhere I’d never seen.Damien followed my eyes, then looked back at me — not annoyed, not defensive. Just… measured.“You read it,” he said.It wasn’t a question.“You had no

The storm didn’t sound like weather.It sounded like warning.Rain hit the glass in hard, impatient fists, and the mansion answered with its own quiet language—slow groans in the walls, a soft settling in the ceiling, the kind of noise a living thing makes when it adjusts its weight in the dark.I lay on my back with my eyes open, staring at a ceiling that didn’t belong to me.Nothing in this room belonged to me—not the expensive sheets that smelled faintly of detergent and money, not the chandelier that hung like a frozen crown, not even the air. The air here always felt filtered, curated, like someone had decided what I was allowed to breathe.Damien had called this safety.But safety isn’t something you drag a girl into.Safety doesn’t come with gates.Safety doesn’t lock from the outside.I turned onto my side and listened.Not just to the storm—to the house.It had a pulse. I didn’t know how else to explain it. Not a heartbeat, not life… but history. Like the mansion had swallowe

The rest of the day, I treated the mansion like a map I intended to escape.If Damien thought “freedom within the grounds” was a gift, he was stupid.Or arrogant.Probably both.I ate nothing. Not out of pride—out of spite. I drank water because dehydration didn’t make rebellion poetic; it made it pathetic.I walked the corridors slowly, counting turns again, noting cameras tucked into corners like quiet eyes. The staff moved around me like I was a storm they’d been warned about. They kept their faces blank, their shoulders tight. If I greeted them, they flinched like kindness was a trap.I hated that.I hated what Damien had turned this place into: a beautiful machine that trained people to behave.By afternoon, I’d found the first locked door.Not a normal locked door. Not a private room.A wing.The hallway leading to it was colder than the rest of the mansion, as if the air refused to stay warm there. The carpet changed. Darker. Thicker. The walls held portraits that didn’t match