Semua Bab Contracted to the man who broke me : Bab 61 - Bab 70

Adrian's POV:Business always ends with a handshake.Power ends with silence.And tonight… mine ended with a glass of whiskey and the city of New York bleeding gold beneath my feet.I leaned back in my chair as Ben Shroff finally stopped talking numbers. The man had a habit of stretching conversations like rubber — useful when negotiating, irritating when I'd already made my decision ten minutes ago. He was the kind of man who confused speaking with thinking. I'd met a thousand of him. I'd buried most of them, professionally speaking."The deal stands," I said flatly, tapping my fingers once against the table. "But only if the shipment moves under my conditions."His lips twitched. Calculating. Nervous.Good.That's where I like them. Right on the edge of yes — where a man will agree to almost anything just to stop feeling like he's losing.He nodded.A few more formalities followed. A few more fake smiles exchanged across a table that cost more than most people's monthly rent. Signat

Ethan's POV:My heart slammed against my ribs. Three hours of sleep and a hard fall had left my body slow and stupid, but my brain caught up fast enough to register the weight of him, the clean smell of his shirt, the way his hand had instinctively braced beside my head so he wouldn’t crush me completely.“Get off,” I muttered. My voice came out rough and cracked.Adrian didn’t move. His eyes, dark and steady, searched my face like he was reading lines of code only he could see. Then something in them changed. A flicker. Not anger exactly. Something hotter. Something that made the air between us feel suddenly too thin.“You spent the entire night with him,” he said quietly. His voice was low, almost calm, but there was an edge underneath it that made my stomach tighten.I blinked. “What?”“Davel.” The name left his mouth like it tasted bitter. “The two of you. Alone in the office until five in the morning. Eating together. Laughing together. Sharing that little break in the chilling ro

Ethan's POV:The other side of the bed was empty.That's what woke me.Not a sound, not an alarm — just the instinctive awareness of absence. The sheets beside me were cool, the indent in the pillow still there but vacant, and somewhere in the half-conscious part of my brain that registers these things before the rest of me catches up, I noted it.I lay there for a moment. Eyes still closed. Listening to the Blackwood Mansion settle around me — that low, familiar breathing of old stone and older wood that I'd gotten used to without realising it.Nothing alarming. Just quiet.I pushed myself up. Slow, blinking, hair in my face, the particular gracelessness of someone dragged out of sleep before they were ready. Swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat on the edge of it for a second, elbows on my knees, eyes adjusting to the morning light coming through the curtains.Bathroom. That was the plan. Simple. Two minutes, then back to bed.I stood. Padded across the room in my socks.An

Adrian's POVThe images weren't ambiguous. Weren't the kind that could be talked away or reframed. They were intimate in the particular way of things that are real — the careless detail, the unguarded expression, the body language of two people who had forgotten, or simply stopped caring, that they could be seen.I stared at the screen for a long time.Looking for the flaw. The edit. The timestamp inconsistency or the lighting that didn't quite match. Some technical seam I could pull apart and hold up as proof that none of this was what it looked like.I found nothing.The room around me blurred at the edges. Sound dropped away — the building's ambient noise, the hum of the ventilation, the distant murmur of the city — all of it retreating to somewhere I couldn't reach.There was no caption. No explanation from the sender. Just the images, arranged in sequence, like evidence presented without argument because the argument wasn't necessary.I set the phone down on the desk with more ca

Ethan's POVA little child in me giggled as they caught the candy of them. Adrian. The man whom I missed badly almost for a month of silence.Eighteen days of unanswered texts, restless nights, and hope that refused to die no matter how many times I tried to bury it. And today—my birthday—when I finally be greeted with his sight. Something inside me doesn't feel right. The happiness was there but with a wavering effect lingering inside me.Is it really him?My steps slowed.Did he come back? How come I didn’t know?My heart began to race, each beat louder than the last as my eyes locked onto his figure.Is he here to surprise me?Brushing the creeping tension away I smile nervously. A flicker of something fragile bloomed inside my chest.Is that why Davel brought me here…?Hope, bloomed.Stupid, fragile hope.I walked toward him with it stitched into every step.My eyes searched his face, memorizing every inch of him like I hadn’t already done that a thousand times before. I thought—n