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บททั้งหมดของ Scent of Obsession : บทที่ 91 - บทที่ 100

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Chapter 85: Four O'Clock

Chapter 84: Four O’ClockDamien’s POVHale’s message landed at twelve seventeen.''She wants to meet. Her lab in the Institute. Four o’clock. Her terms.''Damien read it once. Set the phone face-down on the desk. Picked it up again. Read it a second time. Put it down harder than necessary.He stood and crossed to the window.Saturday afternoon had settled over the city quieter, slower, people drifting instead of cutting through. He watched them without really seeing them. His mind was still half in Dr. Reyes’s office from that morning: eleven recordings that had somehow become fourteen, his own voice coming through the speakers saying things he hadn’t known he’d ever felt.'She redrew every line and I let her.'Four hours in that chair. He’d walked out with fragments instead of the whole picture, but they were sharper than anything he’d managed before. A kitchen full of morning light. Her hands wrapped around a mug both of them. Her face almost resolving before the wall slammed down ag

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Chapter 86: Eleanor

Chapter 86: EleanorDamien's POVThey stayed in the lab until seven.Talking about everything and nothing at the same time.Just existing in the same space with all of it out in the open for the first time which in itself was freeing. The relief of a room where nothing was being managed or measured or given in precise amounts.He asked about Zara.Not about the compound. Not about the plan. Not about any of the things sitting in the room that were going to require more than one evening to properly process.About Zara.What she was like.Liora looked at him when he asked.At his face.Whatever she found there made her decide to answer.She told him about the tutu negotiation.About Gerald and his working position versus his sleeping position.About the park list written on a receipt.About the mama birds said with the authority of someone whose priorities were completely settled.About cities drawn on three pieces of paper taped together with a river running through them.He listened.

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Chapter 86.2; Eleanor

Victor's POVThe house was quiet at this hour.Victor had learned to appreciate quiet.Four years of legal proceedings and courtrooms and lawyers who charged more per hour than most people earned in a month had given him a complicated relationship with noise. Every sound in those rooms had carried weight. Arguments. Objections. The percussion of a legal process dismantling something he'd spent years building.Here there was none of that.Here there was just the house.And Eleanor.He stood in the doorway of her room.She was asleep.Four years old and asleep in the way of children who had exhausted themselves completely during the day and had no reservations about the night. Her dark hair spread across the pillow. Her face slack and peaceful.He looked at her.He always looked at her like this when she was asleep.It was the only time he could look at her without the complicated feeling arriving. The feeling that was love and grief and something else underneath both that he hadn't fou

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Chapter 87: Honest

Chapter 86: HonestCamille's POVShe was at the kitchen island with her coffee when he came in at eight.She’d been awake since six. Not from worry. Camille Beaumont did assessment. She gathered information, turned it over, and arrived at conclusions quietly.She’d been assessing for six weeks.Through a dinner where he’d been somewhere else. Through two 3 a.m. window visits she’d pretended to sleep through. Through a Friday morning when he’d left early and come back different someone who’d put something down and picked something heavier up at the same time.Through a conversation two weeks ago where he’d said something has shifted and she’d said I know, because she did.He was here on a Sunday morning at eight. He knew.She looked at him. At the quality of him this morning that was different from every other morning in fourteen months of sharing a penthouse.He looked like someone who had been cracked open and was still open. Not broken. Open.She’d never seen him open before.“Sit d

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Chapter 87: Monday

Chapter 87: MondayLiam's POVHe sent the formula at six AM.Not the full notebook. Just the relevant pages. Photographed clean and clear and compiled into a document that had taken him forty minutes to format properly.The email went to three addresses simultaneously.His father.The Ashford Biotech research director.And the company's legal team.Subject line: V7 — Complete Formula. Ready for development.He sent it.Sat back.Drank his coffee.His mind went back to six years ago when a second paper that had landed on his desk at MIT had stopped him completely. About the precision of her mind on the page. About following her work across two institutes and a city and understanding early that V7 wasn't just commercially significant.It was extraordinary.She was extraordinary.He'd understood those two things simultaneously and had never fully separated them and had stopped trying to separate them a long while ago ,when he'd walked into a lab in a previous city and introduced himself

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Chapter 88: The Letter

Chapter 88: The LetterDamien's POVIt was on the kitchen counter when he got home.Not the doorman's usual system of leaving things in the lobby. Someone had come up. Someone Victor had trusted enough to give a letter to and say take it directly to him and nobody else and that person had apparently been persuasive enough or well connected enough that the building security had let them up and they'd left the envelope on his kitchen counter and gone.He looked at it for a moment.His name on the front.Victor's handwriting.He recognized it from years of correspondence before everything went wrong. Before Elena. Before the accident. Before three years of insomnia and Victor circling and the Ivory Report and a truck on an intersection and Marcus.He picked it up.Sat at the kitchen island.Opened it.---The letter was four pages.Handwritten. The same precise handwriting on the envelope but looser in places. The specific looseness of someone who had started writing carefully and had st

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Chapter 89: The Weight of Waiting

Chapter 89: The Weight of WaitingDamien's POVTwo weeks.Victor needed two weeks to tell a four year old that the world she knew was about to change.He understood that.He'd agreed to it.Understanding and agreeing didn't make the two weeks feel shorter.He went to Dr Reyes on Wednesday.And Thursday.And the following Monday.The memories were coming back differently now. Not fragments anymore. Not the edge of something and then the wall slamming down. Scenes. Full and complete and sitting in him like things that had always been there and were simply finding their way back to the surface now that the wall had enough cracks in it to let the light through.On Wednesday he remembered the penthouse.The first night.Not in detail. In feeling first. The specific quality of a room that had been empty for a long time and had something in it suddenly that changed its temperature. Her on the bed with her back to him and the city glowing through the glass and him understanding even then in t

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Chapter 90: The Question

.Chapter 90: The QuestionLiora's POVThe question came on a Tuesday.Not dramatically.Not at the end of an argument or in the middle of some important conversation.It came while Liora was putting Zara's hair into two uneven braids before school.Zara sat between her knees on the bathroom stool, looking at herself in the mirror.Liora was trying to separate a section of hair that Zara had apparently decided should never be separated again."Hold still.""I'm holding.""You're moving.""I'm breathing.""Unfortunately."Zara smiled at herself in the mirror.Liora finally got the section free."Done."She tied the elastic around it and reached for the other side.Zara watched her reflection for a moment.Then she said,"Mommy?""Mm?""Are you married to Daddy?"Liora's fingers stopped.Only for half a second.Then they continued working."Why do you ask?""Because Mia's mummy is married to her daddy.""Yes.""And they live together.""Yes."Zara looked at herself in the mirror.Then at

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Chapter 92: What He Chose

Chapter 92: What He ChoseLiora's POVZara's school bag was on the wrong shoulder.Her left shoe was still slightly crooked.And Damien was standing in the hallway looking at Liora like he'd forgotten there was a four-year-old waiting for him to leave.It was becoming a problem."Daddy."Damien looked down."Yes?""We're late.""I've been informed.""By me.""I noticed."Zara sighed.The long, exaggerated sigh of a child who had apparently been forced to manage incompetent adults since birth.Liora covered her mouth.Damien looked at her."You're laughing.""I'm not.""You are.""Go."He took Zara's hand.They made it three steps toward the door.Then Zara stopped.She looked up at Damien."Don't forget the pancakes tomorrow.""I won't.""Fluffy ones.""I know.""And no blueberries.""I know.""Last time you put blueberries.""I remember.""Good."She nodded and continued toward the door.Liora watched them.Something about the sight of them together had been sitting strangely inside

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Chapter 93:Victors Call

Chapter 93: The CallHale's POVThe call came from Victor at eleven PM on a Thursday.He hadn't been expecting it.Especially not tonight . The two weeks were almost up and Victor Lang was a man who honored his word even when his word was the only honorable thing left about him.He answered on the second ring."Lang," he said."Hale." Victor's voice was the same as it had always been. Measured. The voice of a man who had learned to control everything including his own vocal cords. "I told her today."Hale sat up straighter at his desk.Pushed his glasses up."How did she take it," he said carefully.A pause."She's four," Victor said. "She took it the way four year olds take things. She cried. "She asked if we were nice," he said."I told her yes," Victor said quietly. "I told her her father was a serious man but that serious men could be good fathers." A pause that had something in it Hale chose not to examine too closely. "I don't know if that's true. I don't know him well enough a

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