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Semua Bab Contracted to the man who broke me : Bab 101 - Bab 107

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Chapter 101: Missing Ethan

Davel's POVEthan had been gone for nearly an hour.I told myself it was fine. The archive room was a nightmare to navigate, I knew that firsthand, and Ethan was thorough by nature. He wouldn't come back until he had every single file on that list. I went back to my work and let the thought settle.But ten minutes later I looked at the empty chair across from me and felt the first quiet pull of unease.I checked my watch.Then checked it again fifteen minutes after that.By the time the hour mark passed, I had read the same paragraph four times without retaining a single word. I set the papers down, pushed back from my desk, and stood up.He should have been back by now.I walked to the elevator and took it down to the third basement level first. The archive room door was propped open the way it usually was. The floor plan was still taped to the inside of the door. I stepped in and did a full sweep of every row, calling his name once, then twice. The room returned only the particular

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Chapter 102: Haunting Shadows

Ethan's POVThe shadow didn't move again.I stood completely still and watched the space between the covered furniture, my eyes straining against the dim, flickering light, waiting. My own breathing felt obscenely loud in the silence. Too fast. Too shallow. Like something that could be heard from across the room.Nothing moved.Maybe it had been the light playing tricks. Maybe the shifting pulse of that dying bulb had stretched a shadow at the wrong angle and my mind had done the rest.Maybe.But my body didn't believe that.My body had already made its decision. My heart was slamming against my ribs with the single-minded urgency of something that wanted out, and my hands, when I looked down at them, were shaking.I turned back to the door.I grabbed the handle with both hands this time and pulled with everything I had, planting my feet against the base of the frame, throwing my full weight backward. The door groaned. The wood trembled in its frame. A thin crack of the corridor beyon

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Chapter 103: Unconscious Ethan

Leon's POVI had come in for paperwork.That was all this was supposed to be. A forty minute stop, signatures on three documents, and then I was back in my car and on to the rest of my afternoon. I had told myself that on the drive over. Simple. Routine. In and out.Then I walked into the lobby and found Davel moving like a man who had misplaced something he couldn't afford to lose.The guard near the entrance filled me in with three sentences. Ethan. Archive room. Missing for over an hour. I tucked the folder under my arm and followed without being asked.We covered the upper floors first, moving in pairs, checking every corridor and room with the kind of focused efficiency that came from people who understood urgency without needing it explained. Davel directed it all with a controlled precision that would have looked calm to anyone who didn't know him well enough to see what was underneath it.I knew him well enough.He was terrified.We moved down through the levels systematically

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Chapter 104: I couldn't be there

Adrian's POVThe meeting had run longer than anticipated.That was the nature of damage control. It never moved at the pace you wanted it to. It moved at the pace of the people sitting across the table from you, people who needed to be reassured, placated, convinced that the disruption to their interests was temporary and manageable and being handled by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. You gave them that conviction regardless of what was actually happening beneath the surface, because the moment they sensed uncertainty the situation compounded itself.I had given them certainty.The losses would be covered. The timeline would hold. The operations were being restructured from the inside and by the time the dust settled, the foundation would be stronger for it. I delivered all of it with the particular steadiness that these conversations required, and one by one I watched the tension across the table recede to something workable.By the time the last client had been seen o

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Chapter 105: My Safe Place

Ethan's POVThe first thing I was aware of was warmth.Not the cold of the floor. Not the dark. Not the sound of my own breathing coming apart at the seams. Just warmth, and the particular softness of a pillow beneath my cheek, and the distant, reassuring hum of a house that was alive around me.I opened my eyes slowly.The room was dim. The lamp on the bedside table had been turned low, casting everything in a quiet amber that asked nothing of my eyes. Familiar ceiling. Familiar walls.Blackwood Mansion.I lay still for a moment and let that register fully. Let the softness of the bed and the steadiness of the light confirm what my body was still unsure about. That I was out. That the door was not jammed. That there was air here, real and sufficient and moving gently through the room without any effort from me at all.Then I became aware of the presence to my left.I turned my head.Adrian was sitting in the chair beside the bed, jacket removed, shirt slightly creased in the way it o

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Chapter 106: Shadow that disturbs

Ethan's POVThe low amber light of early morning came through the curtains in thin, quiet lines.My eyes flickered open to the known warmth. A soft breath fanning my forehead, slow and steady.I smiled before I even understood why.The recognition came gradually. I was curled against Adrian's side, my cheek resting against his chest, his arm across my back like it had simply stayed there through the night without being asked to.I didn't move.I just lay there, listening to him breathe. Let the room come into focus around me, piece by piece.Blackwood Mansion.My safe place.His arms.Light and warm morning.That's what a normal life should feel like.I closed my eyes again and just breathed.This life is just a dream. A dream I still crave for, every day.A smile was finding its way to my lips when the shadow of yesterday hit me.It jolted something deep.What if it wasn't my imagination?What if it was real?He is really back.My heart skipped.Even the thought sent a coldness throu

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Chapter 107: Frequent panic attack

Ethan's POVThe garden sat still below the balcony. I wasn't looking at it, not really. My eyes had fixed on some middle distance beyond the glass and the green, and my mind had gone somewhere else entirely. Somewhere older.The cell. The cold. The sound of footsteps that meant something was coming.I don't know how long I sat like that before the bushes moved.It was nothing. A bird, wind, something small and meaningless. But my body didn't know that. My body was already somewhere else, already back in that room where nothing was safe and nothing was mine, and before I could think I was up from the chair, legs moving without instruction, and the shadow fell across the balcony wall, wide and growing, and I made a sound I didn't recognise as mine."Aaaaaahhhhhaaawwaaaaa", a loud throat scratching sound."What happened? Are you okay?"I couldn't face it. I pressed myself to the wall, back flat against the stone, and my hands found my own clothes and held on. The shadow, the voice, the o

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