All Chapters of Once Discarded, Now Desired : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

105 Chapters

The Day He Walked Away

Nora saw him before he saw her. Ethan Blackwood. Her ex-husband. The man who had handed her divorce papers three years ago without a single explanation and walked out of her life like she never mattered. He was standing at the head of the office in a charcoal grey suit, phone pressed to his ear, looking every bit like the powerful billionaire the world knew him to be. Then his gaze lifted. And he was staring straight at her. Nora's legs stopped moving. Her heart stopped with them. For one terrible second, the entire world shrank down to just this moment, just this floor, just the two of them, and three years of silence standing between them like a wall of glass. This was her new job. Her fresh start. The position she had worked fourteen months to earn. And Ethan Blackwood was her boss. She almost laughed. If it didn't hurt so much, she actually would have. The receptionist was still talking beside her, but Nora heard nothing. Her eyes stayed locked on Ethan, and he stayed on h

The Devil Remembers

Nora did not sleep that night. She lay in the dark staring at the ceiling while Diana Blackwood's voice played over and over in her head like a song she could not switch off. The words echoed in the silence of her room, each one a fresh cut. "Before my son gets any ideas about playing father." She knows about Liam. But how? Nora had been so careful. Three years of caution. Different city, different name on the lease, no social media, no contact with anyone connected to the Blackwood family. She had built her new life like a fortress, brick by brick, and somehow Diana had still found a crack. The woman was relentless, a predator who never forgot a scent. Nora turned onto her side and looked at the small figure sleeping peacefully in the next bed. Liam. Three years old. Dark hair, dark eyes, a little mouth that never stopped asking questions. He was the most important person in Nora's world and the most dangerous secret she carried. Every beat of her heart belonged to him, and ever

The Math He Did

Ethan did not sleep that night either. He sat in his home office with a glass of whiskey he had not touched and stared at nothing while his mind did the one thing he had been trying to stop it from doing since the boardroom. The numbers. The dates. The truth he could not unsee. The math. Nora had left him three years ago. Or rather, he had left her. He had signed the papers, walked out, and told himself it was the only way to protect her from what his family would do if he didn't. His mother had made that abundantly clear. Diana Blackwood did not make threats. She made promises. Three years. And she had a son. A boy. Young enough to still be in a crib or just out of one. He had not seen the child, but Clara had mentioned it without realizing what she was saying. Something about Nora leaving precisely at five every day to pick up her son from daycare. The words had landed like a punch to his gut. Her son. He picked up his phone and put it down again without dialing. The screen g

What She Left Behind

Nora made one mistake three years ago. She had told one person. Just one. A single moment of weakness in a hospital corridor when she was bleeding and broken and desperate for someone to hold her hand. Not a family member. Not a close friend. Just Sophie, her roommate at the time, the only person who had been in that hospital waiting room with her when everything fell apart. Sophie who had held her hand through the worst night of her life and promised to take the secret to her grave. Sophie who had looked into her eyes and sworn on everything she loved that she would never tell a soul. Sophie had kept that promise. But Sophie had a sister. And that sister worked for a cleaning company that held a contract with Blackwood Industries headquarters. A small detail. An invisible thread. The kind of thing you never think about until it wraps around your throat. Nora figured it out on the bus ride home. It was the only way. The only crack in the wall she had built. She sat on the bus wit

The Man He Became

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Nora stood by the window with her phone still in her hand, and Ethan stood in the doorway, and the air between them was so thick with everything unsaid that breathing felt like an effort. The silence pressed against her skin like a physical weight. She spoke first. "How long were you standing there?" "Long enough," he said. She turned away from him and walked back to her desk. Her hands were steady. She had decided in that moment by the window that she was done being afraid. Fear was a luxury she could not afford anymore. Not with Liam depending on her. Not with Diana circling like a shark. "Then you heard nothing that concerns you," she said, sitting down and opening the Henderson file. "It was a personal call." "She called you leverage." His voice was quiet, but the words landed hard. Nora kept her eyes on the file, though the letters blurred in front of her. "I handled it." "She called my son leverage." The word hit her like a phy

The Message.

Nora did not sleep that night. She lay in the dark staring at the ceiling with the USB drive sitting on her bedside table like a small dangerous thing. She had not touched it since she got home. She had not plugged it in. She had not thrown it away either. It sat there, black and unremarkable, carrying the weight of three years of silence. She just stared at it. On one side was Ethan. Sitting at his desk when she left, calm and composed, looking like a man who had finally unburdened himself of something heavy. Looking like a man who had told the truth. His eyes had been clear. His voice had been steady. He had looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time in three years. On the other side was that message. One line. No name. No number she recognised. "Do not plug that drive into any device. It is not what he told you it is. Meet me tonight if you want the real truth about why Ethan Blackwood destroyed your marriage. I was there. I saw everything." She had read it so ma

The War Begins

Nora drove home in silence. She did not turn on the radio. She did not call Sophie. She just drove with both hands on the wheel and her mind running through everything Helen had said like a film she could not switch off. Diana had forged her signature. Ethan had not abandoned her. He had been shown a document that made him believe she had already chosen to leave. He had signed those papers thinking he was respecting her decision. Thinking he was letting her go cleanly because she had asked him to. And all this time Nora had been carrying three years of anger toward a man who had been lied to just as deeply as she had. She pulled into her street and sat in the parked car for a long moment. She thought about the way he had looked at her across that office on her first day. The way he had said her name. The weight she had seen in his face that she had refused to let herself care about. She understood that weight now. He had been carrying the same thing she had. But understanding

The Morning After

Chapter 8: The Morning After Nora did not go back. She had told herself she would not and for once in her life where Ethan Blackwood was concerned she kept that promise. She went home, checked on Liam, sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and stayed there until the anger settled into something quieter and more dangerous. Not rage. Rage burned out quickly. This was something colder. Something that I thought clearly. He had used her as bait. He had stood in her office and handed her that USB drive with those steady eyes and that carefully measured voice and let her believe he was being honest with her. Let her believe he was finally, after three years, choosing to trust her with the truth. And the whole time it had been a trap. Not for her. But she had been the instrument of it without her knowledge or her consent. She thought about the way her chest had cracked open slightly when he said he was not asking her to fix anything. The way she had almost, for one unguarded moment, b

The Other Side

Nora did not tell Ethan about the call. Not immediately. She stood in that bathroom for three full minutes after the line went dead, thinking about Richard Cole's voice. Smooth. Measured. The voice of someone who had rehearsed that conversation many times before making it. Someone who was destroyed by the Blackwood family long before you were. She thought about how many people that description could apply to. Ethan's family was old money and old power. Companies acquired and dismantled. People moved aside to make room for Blackwood interests. In twenty years of operating at that level there were bound to be casualties she knew nothing about. The question was which one had found her. And why now. She washed her hands, checked her face in the mirror, and walked back to her desk. At two o'clock she sat across from Henderson in Ethan's office and answered his questions carefully and completely. Henderson was a compact, precise man in his sixties with the kind of stillness that came

What He Built

Nora did not sleep again that night. She lay in the dark bedroom, eyes wide open, staring at the faint patterns on the ceiling while Liam's soft, peaceful breathing filled the quiet space. The little boy slept deeply beside her, completely unaware of the storm brewing around him. Ethan’s message still sat on her phone screen like a heavy weight she couldn’t push away. We need to talk. He already knew about Camille Ashford. She was absolutely certain of it. The timing of his message had been too precise, too immediate after her meeting. That could only mean one thing. He had been watching her. Monitoring her movements. The carefully constructed walls she had built around her private life over the past three years were much thinner than she had believed. She turned onto her back slowly, careful not to wake Liam, and rested one protective hand on the edge of the mattress. The anger inside her chest had cooled from a raging fire into something heavier and colder. Something th

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