Scent of Obsession のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 121 - チャプター 130

Chapter 115: What Liora Missed Liora landed back in Turin fourteen hours after she'd left, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the flight and everything to do with handing a ten-year-old boy into a stranger's arms at an airport gate and watching his face try to be brave about it. Elias had been perfect, of course. Steady the way he'd always been steady, crouching down to Mikhail's height in the arrivals hall the same unhurried way he used to crouch down to Zara when she was working through a tantrum about a tutu, and something in Liora had ached watching her brother do that for a child who wasn't his, who wasn't anyone's, not really, not yet. "He'll be all right," Elias had told her at the gate, before she turned back around for the connecting flight. "I promise you that. He'll have Zara and Eleanor driving him half mad within a day, and that's exactly what he needs right now. Something ordinary to be annoyed by." She believed him. She had to believe him, because there

Chapter 117: ElenaShe had stopped trying to track the days somewhere around day four,, but she had never stopped trying to track the hours, because hours were smaller, more honest, easier to hold onto without the weight of everything they added up to.Right now it was somewhere past midnight. She knew that from the particular quality of the dark outside the shuttered window of wherever this was the fourth place in three days, or was it four days, the counting had gotten harder since the wall, since the call, since the six minutes she'd spent standing in cold gravel believing, for the first time in seven years, that the shape of her old life might still exist somewhere waiting for her.The room was better than some of the others had been. A real bed. A window that opened, even if it didn't open far enough to matter. She'd learned, over seven years, to catalogue the small mercies of each new place, sometimes a villa and sometimes a bunker, she stopped caring at a point and started cata

Chapter 119: The AmbushThey stopped for fuel outside a small town whose name Damien didn't bother learning, the kind of anonymous roadside station that had felt, an hour ago, like exactly the sort of place nobody would think to look for them.He was wrong about that within four minutes.Victor noticed it first a dark sedan pulling in two pumps down, no one getting out, the engine still running. He didn't say anything at first, just angled himself slightly, hand drifting toward his jacket, and Damien felt the shift in him before he understood the reason for it."Don't look at the car," Victor said quietly. "Get back in ours. Slowly."Damien didn't ask why. Two days of this had taught him to trust Victor's instincts about danger faster than his own.Liora was already climbing in, Sabine's team fanning out with the smooth, unhurried efficiency of people who'd clearly trained for exactly this scenario, and Damien had barely pulled his door shut when the sedan's engine revved and two men

Chapter 121: VictorThe house outside Lyon belonged to a woman named Dr. Aurelie Chen, who opened her door at eleven at night to four exhausted strangers and a small security detail without asking a single question until everyone was inside and the door was locked behind them."Liora explained enough on the phone," she said, when Victor finally asked how she was taking all of this so calmly, pouring coffee into mismatched mugs like this was an ordinary late guest rather than a household suddenly doubling in size at midnight. "I've known her seven years. I know what it costs her to ask for help. If she's asking, I don't need the whole story to know it's real."Victor found himself liking the woman immediately, the particular steadiness of someone who'd clearly decided a long time ago what kind of person she wanted to be in a crisis and never wavered from it since. It was a rare quality. He'd spent most of his adult life around people who only discovered who they actually were once some

Chapter 123: The MansionThe estate sat behind gates that opened without anyone visibly signaling them, long and floodlit at the edges, a house built by someone who'd never once had to worry about the cost of anything.Liora hadn't said much on the drive. She'd spent it watching the back of the stranger's head in the front seat, cataloguing him the way she catalogued dangerous unknowns in a lab — carefully, without letting her hands show how unsettled she was.Inside, a woman in a dark uniform took Sabine off to have her arm looked at properly by someone who was, apparently, a doctor kept permanently on staff, which told Liora something about how often this house needed one. The rest of them were shown into a room with a fire already lit, drinks already poured, like their arrival had been expected down to the minute."Nikolai Sorokin," the man said, finally offering the name, settling into a chair across from them with the ease of someone in his own space. "You'll forgive me for not