All Chapters of Marked By Two: Chapter 81 - Chapter 84

Maeve never liked silence because silence meant thinking. And thinking usually led to ugly things she spent years trying not to feel.Regret. Jealousy. Humiliation.The luxury apartment overlooking the city should have felt calming. Expensive marble floors. Soft music drifting through hidden speakers. Rain tapping lightly against the windows.Instead, Maeve stood near the balcony with a cigarette between her fingers watching dawn slowly bleed across the skyline while her stomach twisted harder with every passing hour.Max was dead.That wasn’t supposed to happen.Behind her, Ryan paced the living room restlessly.“You said nobody was supposed to die.”Maeve closed her eyes briefly.God.Ryan was becoming exhausting.“You need to calm down.”“How the hell am I supposed to calm down?” he snapped. “They said Max got shot trying to protect her!”Maeve turned slowly toward him.Ryan looked terrible. Pale. Panicked. Angry in the pathetic kind of way men became when reality finally stopped

Maeve knew something was wrong the second her phone started vibrating against the marble countertop.Three calls. Then five. Then eight. One after another, the screen lit up in the dim apartment, a relentless, buzzing intrusion that made the air in the room feel instantly thin. By the time she finally snapped the phone to her ear, her patience had already died.“What?” she demanded, her voice cutting through the quiet.The voice on the other end sounded absolutely terrified, the breathing shallow and erratic. “Ma'am... they found the archive.”For a long moment, Maeve said nothing. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse, the city skyline stretched out in a blur of gray and black, rain sliding down the glass in heavy, distorted sheets.“They found what?” she asked, her voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.“The Blackthorne Archive.”The room seemed to tilt slightly beneath her feet. Maeve stood up slowly from the sofa, her knuckles turning white around the phone. “No. Th