All Chapters of Bound by Obsession: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

50 Chapters

War Of Words

The article dropped exactly when Lucas said it would.I woke to my phone exploding with notifications. Messages. Emails. Missed calls from numbers I didn't recognize.Damien was already up, in his studies, on a conference call with his legal team and PR people.I grabbed my phone and made the mistake of opening Twitter.The article was everywhere. Trending. Shared thousands of times. And the comments :I knew it was fake. No one falls in love that fast.She's obviously a gold-digger. His father is just trying to protect him.Poor Richard Cross. Watching his son throw away his life for a woman who only wants his money.I kept scrolling, my stomach churning, until I found defenders too:Richard Cross is the one who destroyed her family's business! Read the whole story!This is a hit piece. Damien and Isla are clearly in love.Richard is manipulating the narrative because he lost in court.But the damage was done. The story was out there. Richard's version painted me as a calculated sche

The Next Move

We ordered Thai food and ate on the couch, watching the news coverage of our press conference."You were incredible today," Damien said. "That line about Richard's scheme backfiring? Creating a real marriage instead of a fake one? Brilliant.""It's true though. He wanted to control us. Instead, he brought us together.""Ironic, isn't it? His worst nightmare is our greatest gift." He set down his takeout. "Come here."I moved into his arms, both of us rearranging until I was straddling his lap on the couch."Hi," I said."Hi." His hands settled on my hips. "You know what I want to do right now?""What?""Forget about Richard. Forget about the press. Forget about everything except us." His hands slid under my shirt. "Want to make you forget too. Want to make you feel nothing but this. Us."Heat pooled low in my stomach. "That sounds perfect."He pulled my shirt over my head, tossing it aside. His mouth found my breast, tongue circling my nipple through my bra."Too many clothes," I gasp

The Quiet After The War

I woke to light coming in wrong.Not the penthouse's east-facing bedroom light, which arrived at a particular angle I'd memorized over months of waking in it. This was different — earlier, softer, the specific quality of morning that arrived before the city had fully committed to the day.Damien was already awake.He was propped on one elbow beside me, not on his phone, not reviewing documents, not doing any of the things he did when he woke before me. Just watching me. With the particular quality of attention he usually reserved for things he was trying to understand."That's unsettling," I said, without opening my eyes fully."You were smiling in your sleep.""People do that.""You don't. Usually." He traced one finger along my jaw, light enough to be almost nothing. "What were you dreaming about?"I thought about it. The dream was already dissolving the way dreams did, leaving only an impression — warmth, color, the specific feeling of something going right."The factory floor," I

The Quiet After

For lunch, we went to a place in the West Village. The one with the mediocre coffee and the extraordinary eggs, cash only, no reservations, nobody recognizing either of us.We sat in the window booth and ordered without looking at the menu and watched the neighborhood go about its Saturday."So," Damien said, over the good eggs."So," I said."No Richard.""No Richard.""No legal challenge.""No legal challenge.""No review period. No six-month deadline. No judge." He looked at me across the table. "Just married.""Just married," I agreed. "Terrifying, isn't it.""Completely." He stole a piece of my toast, which had become the established pattern. "What do we do first? With the quiet."I thought about it. "I want to paint. A new series — not grief, not the year. Something about what comes after." I looked out the window at the street. "I want to think about what forward looks like as a subject instead of surviving as a subject.""Good." He meant it simply, as fact. "What else?""Monro

Dishes

The dishes were still in the sink.Same dishes as yesterday. Same dishes as the day before, if I was honest, though yesterday's had migrated slightly to the right, suggesting someone had moved them without washing them, which somehow made it worse.I stood at the kitchen counter at seven in the morning, coffee in hand, looking at the stack of breakfast plates and the particular willful blindness they represented.Damien walked in behind me, tie undone, already on his phone."Good morning," he said, heading for the espresso machine without looking at the sink."Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" I asked.He looked up from his phone. Looked at me. Looked—briefly, technically—at the sink. "I'll get those tonight.""You said that yesterday.""I was working until midnight yesterday.""And the dishes grew legs and moved themselves, which is why they're now slightly to the right of where they were on Tuesday?"He set down his phone with the careful deliberateness of someone choosing their batt

Pattern

THREE DAYS AFTER THE DISHES FIGHTIt started, as most things between us did, with an argument that wasn't really about what it was about.We were in the kitchen on a Sunday morning. I was attempting the banana bread recipe from my father's cookbook, attempting being the operative word, because the cookbook's measurements were in his handwriting and his handwriting was optimistic at best, illegible at worst. The notation for baking soda looked either like 1 tsp or 7 tsp depending on the angle."It's one," Damien said from behind his newspaper. He still read a physical newspaper, which I found both endearing and slightly performative. "Nobody uses seven teaspoons of baking soda.""You're reading upside down from there.""I have very good peripheral vision." He turned a page. "Also, the loaf you made last week with the ambiguous measurement tasted like a chemistry experiment.""Last week was the vanilla extract notation, which is a completely different problem—""The pattern of illegible

Afterward

The banana bread went in the oven forty minutes late.We'd migrated to the couch, both somewhat disreputable in appearance, the Sunday newspaper spread across the cushions. Damien had retrieved his coffee, which was cold, and refused to reheat it on principle. I had retrieved my coffee, which was also cold, and reheated mine without principle because lukewarm coffee was one of the small sadnesses I saw no reason to endure."The dishes' thing," he said, without preamble.I looked over from my end of the couch. "What about it?""I've been thinking about the pattern." He had his reading glasses on, the CEO's armor finally softened enough to include the fact that he was slightly farsighted. "You said fight about small things early. So they don't become large things late.""I said that, yes.""So I want to say something while it's still small."I turned to face him properly. He had the quality of attention that meant he'd been thinking about this for more than this morning."The company,"

Watched

FOUR WEEKS LATERThe car was wrong.I noticed it the way you notice something at the edge of vision, not looking directly at it, just aware that it was there when it shouldn't be. A dark sedan, parked across from the Monroe-Cross building on Tuesday. The same car, or one like it, outside the gallery on Thursday when I went in to discuss the provenance series with Margaret.On Friday, walking back from the coffee place two blocks from the penthouse that Damien didn't know I'd adopted as my morning ritual, I saw it again.Or I thought I did.That was the problem with paranoia in its early stages, you couldn't trust your own pattern recognition. You didn't know if you were seeing something real or manufacturing coherence from random data because your nervous system had been trained by six months of actual surveillance to expect it.I didn't tell Damien on Friday.I didn't tell him on Saturday either, because Saturday was good, we drove upstate to look at a property he was considering for

What It Couldn't Touch

FRIDAYI told Sophie over coffee, because Sophie was the person I told things to when I needed to hear them out loud without anyone trying to fix them.She listened with her chin in her hand and the specific expression she wore when she was both concerned and compiling."How's Damien handling it?" she asked."Controlled. So far." I wrapped both hands around my mug. "He's doing the thing where he manages himself very deliberately so that I don't see the actual level of alarm underneath.""But you see it anyway.""I always see it. He knows I see it. It's become this—this thing between us where we both know he's holding something back and we both know I know, and he does it anyway because the alternative is him acting on every impulse and me losing my autonomy by degrees." I paused. "It works, mostly. As long as the thing he's holding back doesn't get too heavy.""And right now?""Right now it's manageable," I looked at my coffee. "I'm more worried about what happens if Lucas finds more.

Walls

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE CAR DISAPPEAREDThe security detail arrived on a Tuesday.I came out of the Monroe-Cross building at six in the evening, coat half-on, bag over my shoulder, already mentally composing the email I needed to send before dinner, and found a man I'd never seen before standing beside the car that wasn't my usual car service.He was large, contained, and wearing the particular neutral expression of someone professionally trained to have no expression."Mrs. Cross," he said. "I'm James. Mr. Cross arranged—""He did," I said. "He did arrange that."I took out my phone and called Damien.He answered on the second ring. "Hey. You out?""I'm out. I'm looking at a man named James."A pause. "He comes highly recommended. Former—""I don't need his CV." I kept my voice even with some effort. "We talked about this.""We talked about not taking different routes. We didn't talk about whether enhanced security was—""We talked about me not losing my autonomy by degrees." The man nam

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