《OWNED IN THE DARK》全部章節：第 161 章 - 第 170 章

MATHEW The first thing I became aware of was the smell of burning rubber, melted metal, gasoline and smoke.It coated the back of my throat and settled heavily in my lungs every time I tried to breathe.For a few seconds, I couldn't figure out where I was.My ears were ringing so violently that the world sounded underwater. Everything around me was muffled and distant, like I was listening through several feet of concrete.Then the pain arrived.A brutal, white-hot agony exploded through my left shoulder, dragging a groan from my chest before I could stop it.I opened my eyes.The world tilted.Gray gravel stretched beneath me.A strip of scorched lawn.Dark smoke climbing into the afternoon sky and twenty feet away, what remained of Ciara's Mercedes or what used to be her Mercedes.The armored SUV was now a twisted wreck of blackened steel and shattered glass. Flames licked through the mangled frame while thick smoke poured upward, staining the sky.For a moment I simply stared.Try

MATHEW The metric-grade steel of the restraint cuffs clicked with a heavy, insulting finality against the iron frame of the medical bed.I strained against the metal, the muscles in my forearms bunching into thick cords as I tried to rip the anchors straight out of the reinforced headboard. The frame groaned, but the structure didn't yield an inch. It was reinforced with the same industrial-grade concrete pouring we used for the subterranean holding cells."Carlista!" I roared, my voice a rough, gravelly rumble that rattled the glass panes of the master suite windows. "Unlatch the security loop before I break your jaw!"My sister didn't even look up from her tablet. She was sitting in the leather armchair by the window, her silver-cropped hair catching the morning sun, completely unfazed by the fact that her six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound brother was currently trying to demolish the room's infrastructure. She was dressed in her standard tactical trousers and a dark tank t

MATHEW The board meeting had already dragged on for nearly two hours.By that point, everyone around the massive mahogany conference table looked exhausted.The air inside Diamond LLC executive boardroom was cool enough to make the glass walls feel cold to the touch. Financial reports glowed across multiple screens while projections, asset transfers, and liquidation schedules scrolled endlessly across the main monitor.I sat at the head of the table, half-listening as another executive explained the final phase of dismantling several offshore accounts that had once belonged to my father's network.Louis stood near the presentation screen, reviewing numbers on his tablet while the board members quietly worked through reports. Nobody spoke unless they had something useful to add.The room operated like a machine.The boardroom doors suddenly slammed open.Several executives jumped.One woman nearly dropped her tablet."You can't keep locking me out!"The shrill voice echoed through the

MATHEW The smell of burning aviation fuel, damp tarmac, and the sharp, chemical tang of industrial de-icer always settled into the back of my throat like a baseline threat.I stood in the shadow of Private Hangar 4 at JFK International, my six-foot-four frame absolute under a heavy black tactical coat that brushed the tops of my utility boots. The rain from the previous midnight had reduced to a low, greasy fog that rolled off the runways, painting the rows of parked Gulfstreams in blurry, shifting halos of yellow and white security light. The temperature out on the asphalt was locked into a freezing vibration, but the internal furnace of my body was running hot, my jaw clamped shut so tight the muscle beneath my ear was actively twitching.Louis stood three paces behind me, his gray eyes tracking the global maritime data feeds on his handheld terminal while his other hand remained casually pocketed near the grip of his suppressed sidearm."The flight plan for Zurich is clearing its

MATHEW The earth in the private Harvour burial plot was frozen solid, resisting the shovels until the guard units used localized thermal cutters to slice a six-foot perimeter into the clay.I stood at the edge of the open trench, my six-foot-four bulk anchored against a freezing, brutal wind that swept off the Hudson, my dark tactical wool coat buttoned tight to my throat to shield the cracked ribs beneath. The sky above was a flat, unedited slate of iron gray, mirroring the total static of the landscape. There were no civilian mourners here. There were no public obituaries printed in the morning wire services. You don’t publish the termination script of an old-world fixer like Catya; you simply close her and bury her keys beneath three feet of reinforced concrete.Ciara stood right beside my shoulder, her long frame draped in a dark silk trench coat, her face a mask of dead, freezing calm as her dark eyes tracked the slow lowering of the steel casket. Carlista was two paces back,