All Chapters of My Father’s Enemy, My Obsession : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

The safehouse feels smaller tonight.It’s not the size—same concrete walls, same metal table, same hum of servers in the adjacent room.It’s the weight.The evidence bag with Ava’s necklace sits in the center of the war‑room table like a tiny, glittering curse.No one touches it now.They work around it.On the wall, a large screen shows Cass’s desktop: code, maps, and logs layered in organized chaos. Nolan sits beneath it, laptop open, a half‑drunk coffee cooling at his elbow.Damian stands because sitting feels like admitting there’s time to waste. His hands are bandaged, knuckles scraped, eyes bloodshot but sharp.“Start talking,” he says.Cass pushes her glasses up her nose and drags a window to the center of the screen.“Okay,” she says. “Our charming little gift took the scenic route to get to you. I’ve back‑traced the package’s label activity. There were four scanning points: Kade Tower intake, a private courier hub in Queens, a strip‑mall mail store in Brooklyn, and a logistic

Valen’s taunt doesn’t land in a vacuum.While he rewinds and replays Damian’s fury on his screens, other eyes are watching a different kind of feed.Cass’s.***“Got you, you slippery bastard,” Cass mutters.She’s been awake so long the world has a faint halo around it. Her apartment is a chaos of empty coffee cups, snack wrappers, and a glow that makes her skin look ghostly blue.On one monitor, the city map sits open, threaded with lines—network traces, shell company links, last‑known pings from burner accounts that should be dead.On another, packet captures scroll like rain.Nolan’s voice crackles in her ear.“Tell me you have something,” he says. “Even if it’s a hallucination, just lie to me.”“I don’t hallucinate,” she says. “I brute‑force reality until it gives in.”She drags two data sets together: the routing anomalies that match Valen’s digital accent, and a series of short‑burst signals she’s been watching for the last twelve hours—tiny handshakes, too clean to be noise, bo

For a split second, everyone freezes.Ava, on her knees, hair in her face.The guard, gun leveled at her chest, eyes wide with the shock of a woman falling out of his ceiling.He recovers first.“Don’t move,” he barks.Adrenaline slices through the fog in her veins.Her gaze flicks past him.Fire extinguisher on the wall.Close.She moves.He reacts too late.She surges forward and to the side, shoulder slamming into his shins. The shot goes wide, deafening in the narrow corridor, bullet sparking off concrete.She crashes into the wall, pain flaring up her arm.The extinguisher is within reach.She snatches it off its bracket, hefts it with both hands, and swings.Hard.It connects with his knee with a sickening crack.He howls, leg buckling.He goes down on one knee, gun clattering.She swings again, instinct and rage and terror giving her more force than her slight frame should have.The extinguisher slams into his forearm as he grabs for the weapon.Bone meets metal; a curse tears

Time fractures.On one shard, Ava stands on a steel catwalk, air burning in her lungs, bare feet numb against cold metal, Valen’s rifle aimed straight at her chest.On another, Damian’s world narrows to a line:Valen. The muzzle. Ava.Everything else—sirens, shouts, the sting of smoke in his eyes—drops away.“Ava!” he roars.She doesn’t have time to duck.She only has time to see Valen’s finger tighten on the trigger, his expression unreadable.The rifle cracks.Damian moves.He doesn’t think about it.He just steps.One stride, two—shoving Adrian aside, twisting, slamming into Ava with his full weight.The impact is brutal.For the second time in minutes, her breath is knocked out of her. Her shoulder hits the railing hard enough that sparks burst behind her eyes.Then something hot punches into Damian’s side.It feels, for the barest instant, like a hammer blow.Then, like fire.He hears the sound more than feels it—the wet, ugly thump of the bullet meeting flesh.His legs falte

Waking up is not a slow process.It’s a sharp, violent drag from dark to light, accompanied by the sensation of hot wire threaded under his ribs.Damian inhales sharply, eyes snapping open.The light is too bright.The ceiling is unfamiliar acoustic tile, not the smooth expanse of his penthouse.The smell is wrong—antiseptic and iron instead of clean city air.And the pain is immediate.He tries to sit up.His left side screams in protest, a blinding, tearing agony that forces a harsh grunt from his throat.“Don’t,” a voice says instantly. “Stop moving.”He freezes, muscles locked against the pain, heart hammering as the fog of sedation shreds.The voice.He turns his head slowly on the pillow.Ava.She’s sitting in a metal chair beside the cot, elbows on the mattress, both hands wrapped tightly around his right hand.She looks terrible.There are dark circles under her eyes, her hair is a tangled mess, and she’s still wearing a silk slip that’s smeared with dirt and his own dried blo