Meant To Be Daddy’s: Claimed By My Fiance’s Father のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 101 - チャプター 110

DAMIENMarcus slept within twenty minutes of the seizure ending. His breathing was even and steady, the lines of pain that had been living on his face for days finally absent. Dara checked his vitals twice before she allowed herself to feel satisfied even though it was cautious “His temperature is normalizing,” she said quietly, gathering her kit. “The compound is doing what it should. I want to check him again in four hours but the immediate crisis has passed.”“Thank you,” I said.She nodded and left with the discretion of someone who understood that the room needed to breathe now.I sat in the chair beside Marcus’s bed and looked at my son sleeping, letting myself feel the relief properly for about three minutes before I put it away and started thinking about what came next.Agnes appeared in the doorway with tea I hadn’t asked for and set it on the side table without a word and disappeared again. I picked it up and drank it without tasting it and watched Marcus breathe.When he

SERAPHINAThe ceiling was the first thing.White, low with a single light above me, bright enough to make me blink repeatedly before my eyes could hold it.I tried to move my hands.They didn’t move.The restraints on my wrists were soft, medical rather than punitive. My ankles too, the same material, the same careful positioning. A drip was attached to the back of my left hand, the needle taped flat, a clear bag hanging from a stand beside the bed.I turned my head.The man who wore my father’s face was standing near the wall.A doctor, or someone dressed as one, stood on the other side of the bed checking something on a tablet with the indifference of a professional performing a task they had done many times before.I looked at the man by the wall. “Who are you?”My voice came out rougher than I expected. My jaw ached on the left side where he’d hit me and the pain was specific and informative every time I moved my mouth.He looked at me with Gregory’s eyes.“You figured it out,” he

SERAPHINAThe gun was old when he brought it out, showing that it had been used relentlessly; the metal was worn smooth at the grip, and the cylinder bore the kind of handling that came from years rather than months.Cael opened it in front of me.One bullet. Sitting in one chamber, the others empty, the light catching the brass casing for just a moment before he clicked the cylinder back into place and spun it.I looked at Callum.He was on his knees on the stone floor, his hands behind his back, the wound on his side pulling at him with every breath in a way he was trying not to show and failing. He looked at me with eyes that were completely clear and completely certain.“Don’t,” he said. His voice was rough but it carried.“You know what I want,” Cael said. He moved to stand behind Callum and placed the barrel of the gun against the back of his head. The sight of it, the simple physical fact of that metal touching Callum’s skull, did something to my chest that I couldn’t describe

DAMIENAgnes reached her first.She crossed the entrance hall as though she had been waiting for this exact moment and she put her arms around Seraphina and held her without saying anything at all.Seraphina went into it completely.Her shoulders dropped and her head came down and she held Agnes back with both arms. It must have been so hard for several days and now she had finally encountered something solid enough to let go against.I stood in the entrance hall and watched without moving or speaking because nothing I could have said would have improved the moment.Nadia appeared at the top of the stairs.She stood there for a moment taking in the sight of Seraphina in the entrance hall, alive, standing, home, and instantly grew teary.She came down the stairs fast and when she reached the bottom she said “Oh thank god” in a voice that barely held together and then she was part of the embrace too, her arms going around both Seraphina and Agnes, the three of them in the entrance hall

SERAPHINAIt unraveled me because it was not the desperate kind, not the kind that came from argument or adrenaline or the specific combustion of proximity and frustration. Something slower. Something that had been building for three days of not knowing what was happening to him and not knowing if he was coming and then suddenly him being there in that courtyard with his eyes red and his claws out and the look on his face when he saw me that he’d composed into something controlled before most people could have registered it but I had registered it.I had seen his face before he composed it.He kissed me back.Both hands coming up to hold my face the way he did, thumbs against my jaw, careful of the bruising, tilting my face toward his with the kind of attention that made the rest of the world irrelevant.I said against his mouth, “I missed this.”He made a sound that wasn’t quite a word and kissed me again, deeper this time, the careful distance of the last hour dissolving in the way