บททั้งหมดของ Ruin Me,DADDY: บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 80

Chapter 72Dinner started at seven and by seven forty-five Lila had stopped counting the number of times she'd braced for something to go wrong.It hadn't gone wrong.That was the part she couldn't stop turning over. Her mother was sitting at Lucian's dining table, working through a plate of herb-crusted lamb that Marcos had prepared with the kind of quiet focus that meant she approved of it but wasn't ready to say so out loud, and the conversation had been moving for nearly an hour without a single moment that made Lila want to disappear into the floor.Lucian had done something she hadn't expected. He had asked Elena questions.Not polite questions, the kind people asked when they were waiting for their turn to speak again. Real ones. He had asked about her work, she had spent twenty-two years as a billing administrator for a hospital network in Coral Gables, and listened to the answer with the same attention he gave acquisition reports

Chapter 74Elena stayed three days.By the second morning she had learned Marcos's schedule well enough to be in the kitchen when he started breakfast, asking questions about his sourcing and techniques with the focused intensity she applied to everything she decided was worth understanding. Marcos, who was not a man easily charmed, answered every question and started plating her coffee the way she liked it without being asked.Lucian watched this from the doorway on the second morning and said nothing, but Lila caught the look on his face. Quiet approval. The look he got when something worked the way it was supposed to.The days had a rhythm. Lucian left early and came back by late afternoon. Lila worked from the home office on a campaign rollout that was already two days behind, and Elena occupied herself with the garden, the kitchen, and a paperback she had brought that she pretended not to be racing through. In the evenings they ate together and the conversation came easier each

Chapter 76Lucian had not gone to work.He had made the decision somewhere between Elena's car disappearing down the drive and Lila's face when she came back inside, something in it still wound tight from the morning, from three days of holding herself together for her mother's visit, from the call she hadn't told him the full details of yet. He had looked at her and known, the way he had learned to know, that today was not a day for the office.He had texted Sophia a single line. Clear the morning. I'll be in for the two o'clock if anything is critical.Sophia had responded: Noted. Nothing is critical.He had put his phone face-down on the kitchen counter and stayed.Now they were in the sitting room, the one off the main hallway, the one with the low couch and the windows that faced the garden, and the morning light was coming through in that particular way it did in late spring, warm and a little hazy, and Lila was on the couc

Chapter 78The room was a concrete box.No windows. One bare bulb hanging from a chain that swayed every time the van outside rumbled past. The air smelled of damp earth, rust, and old oil. My wrists were zip-tied to a metal pipe that ran along the wall, high enough that my shoulders burned if I tried to sit. Elena was tied to the same pipe three feet away, her head slumped forward, still unconscious from whatever they had used on us.My throat was raw. My stomach had stopped growling hours ago and now just ached with a hollow, constant pain. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten breakfast at the mansion felt like another lifetime. The bottle of water they had tossed in earlier was long empty. My tongue felt thick and dry, sticking to the roof of my mouth every time I tried to swallow.I shifted, trying to ease the pressure on my wrists, and the zip-ties bit deeper. Blood had dried in thin lines down my forearms. I looked at my mother agai

**Chapter 80** The room had no windows, which meant I'd lost any real sense of time. I could tell you it was dark. I could tell you the concrete under me had gone from cold to numbing to something my body had simply stopped registering. Beyond that, hours and minutes had blurred into one long stretch of waiting. My wrists had gone past pain into a kind of static hum, the zip-ties biting a groove into skin that had stopped bleeding an hour ago, or maybe three. My throat felt like it had been sanded down. My stomach didn't ache anymore so much as sit there, hollow and quiet, like it had given up asking. Elena was beside me, tied to the same length of pipe, and for a long while I'd been more worried about her than myself. She'd surfaced once — eyes cracking open, my name coming out of her in a rasp — before exhaustion pulled her back under. I watched her chest rise and fall and made myself focus on that instead of the ache in my own arms. As long as she was breathing, I had one thing t