Todos os capítulos de The Don's Dirty Obsession : Capítulo 81 - Capítulo 90

The drive back to Vermont was silent, the kind of heavy silence that pressed down on the chest and made every breath feel labored. The highway stretched out ahead like an endless gray ribbon, broken only by the occasional passing car and the rhythmic thump of tires on asphalt. Cedric stared out the passenger window, watching the world blur by in streaks of trees, fields, and distant mountains. He didn’t mention Brett. He didn’t say a word about the scarred face at the red light, the mock toast, the smile that had sent ice through his veins. He told himself it was a trick of the light, a hallucination born from exhaustion and the emotional wreckage of the prison visit. His mind was playing games with him. That was all.Gianni drove with one hand on the wheel, the other occasionally reaching over to squeeze Cedric’s knee. Lily sat in the back with the dog, her head resting against the window, eyes half-closed but alert. The radio played softly, some old country song about lost love and

The school looked nothing like he remembered.Or maybe it did, and that was the problem.Cedric sat in the parked car for longer than he meant to, engine off, hands still on the wheel. The building was half-dead already, windows boarded, walls tagged in overlapping graffiti, a demolition notice stapled to a post near the entrance that the weather had already started to erase. In a few months none of this would exist. Just a cleared lot and whatever they decided to put there instead.He wondered if that would feel like something. Right now it just felt like a building.He'd driven here alone. Gianni had stood in the doorway when he left, not saying anything, which was its own kind of argument. Lily had been at the kitchen window with the dog pressed against her side, watching him back the car out. He hadn't looked in the rearview mirror after that. If he had, he probably wouldn't have left.Two hours. He'd told her two hours.He got out of the car.The air was cold and damp, the smell

The room smelled like every bad decision the previous guests had ever made.Cigarette smoke soaked into the walls so deep it had become part of the structure. The carpet had a path worn into it from the door to the bed, thin as a scar, from however many people had paced this same small square of floor before him. The lamp on the table flickered every few minutes. Cedric had stopped noticing it around hour three.He didn't know exactly when he'd last slept. He'd stopped counting somewhere around the forty-hour mark because the number had stopped meaning anything useful.The drive was plugged into the laptop. He'd been going through it slowly, the way you go through something you know is going to hurt, not fast, not recklessly, but steadily, because stopping felt worse than continuing. Names. Transaction records. Photographs. Shell company structures laid out in careful columns like someone had spent years making sure it would all be easy to follow if anyone ever looked. The thoroughnes

The first thing Cedric noticed was that he'd stopped flinching at cars.Not all at once. It happened gradually, the way the body unlearns things, one morning he realized the sound of a vehicle slowing outside the house hadn't made him tense, and he stood in the kitchen holding his coffee and tried to remember when that had changed. He couldn't. It had just happened, quietly, while he wasn't paying attention.That felt like the most accurate description of Canada he had.The town was small and tucked between mountains and forest in a way that felt almost deliberate, like the geography was in on it. Snow on the peaks year round. Evergreens dense enough to change the quality of light in summer, turning everything slightly green and dim and cool. The air smelled like pine and rain even on dry days, and at first that smell had made him alert the way unfamiliar things did, and then one day it just smelled like outside. Like where he lived.Anna's network had built them good identities. Not

The fog had come in thick off the water, the kind that didn't just obscure things but seemed to absorb them, buildings, lights, sound, all of it swallowed into grey until the world shrank down to whatever was directly in front of you.Cedric walked the pier alone.He'd been here before in dreams. Not the good kind, the kind where you're running but the ground keeps shifting, where the thing behind you never quite arrives but never stops coming either. He'd woken from those dreams more times than he could count, heart going, sheets damp, staring at a ceiling in whatever room he'd been sleeping in that month. He'd never thought he'd actually come back.The old planks creaked under his boots, each step announcing itself in the fog. The smell was exactly as he'd kept it in memory, salt and rotting wood and diesel from boats somewhere out in the harbour, invisible but present, like everything here. Moonlight made it through in a thin, washed-out way that lit nothing so much as suggested th